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New MPEG-4 Licensing Scheme
morcheeba writes: "EETimes is reporting that the licensing of MPEG-4 patents will be substantially different than the existing MPEG-2 licenses. The per-player fee will be substantially cheaper ($0.25 instead of $2.50), but a new "use fee" component of $0.02/hour will be charged to service providers. More on MPEG-4 in general at MacWeek; The MPEG-4 Industry Forum and MPEG LA are handling the licenses."
It looks like they are breathing more life into MPEG2, then. "Use fee" for a data format? That's supposedly a standard? Right.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
"It begins."
.MP? we have sitting on our hard drives.
It only takes tiny steps to walk off the edge of a cliff. I'm sure eventually they'll propose we pay a small monthly fee (just a trifle, really!) for every
I get a little more militant about this stuff every day. But I don't think I'm wrong, either.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
At that point all you have to do is write your own piece of software that implements the algorithm, and you don't have to pay anybody anything.
Presumably by then there will be new and improved patented algorithms, but it's nice to know that you will always have free technology to use, although sometimes a little outdated. (Or not, the RSA patent has expired and it is still the most popular public-key cryptosystem)
I know the tech world doesn't change that fast, and we have been waiting for mpeg4 for a while, But that MacWeek article is dated Nov. 2000. Somethings might of changed since then
Doesn't sound like much, but after just 125 hours of use, they'll make more money off of this then they ever did off of MPEG-2.
125 hours may sound like a lot, but it's less then 2.5 hours a week for a year. Or just over 20 minutes a day for a year.... I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Although I understand your point, you failed to consider one little thing:
20 years ago, 20K of RAM in a "Personal Computer" was a REAL big deal. Do you still have people hacking out apps for a Vic-20? No. 10 years ago, "who will ever need more than 640k of RAM" was still somewhat in fashion. 20 years from now we'll be laughing at MP4's.
So I'm sorry man, but your solution or proposal or whatever is really not an option. By any means. By the time the coders get their hands on the inards of the thing, we'll be bitching about MP15's.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Actually, it's the other way around. The MPEG group went shopping around for a base file format to use for MPEG-4 and they chose the Quicktime file format as the basis for all MPEG-4 files. I believe they chose it because it is a simple, flexible and (most importantly) free and well-documented standard. Note that this has nothing to do with any of the Quicktime codecs (I know the Sorenson codec is a particular point of contention here on /.) but instead the base file format for all quicktime media. An analogous file format would be the .avi file format. It's simply a wrapper.
Also, note that they said 'service providers'. I would assume this would mean providers that use MPEG-4 for content delivery, such as VOD, much like MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are used for VOD right now.
I could hardly believe they would so horribly cripple the usefulness of the format by making it so that any player that used the codec would have to report back the time used to some organization so that someone can be billed for it. That's just dumb and I don't see why anyone would touch it with a 10-foot pole if that was the case.
Everything that happens in this world that is malevolent in nature....
Are you kidding me? Malevolent? Are you sitting there at your computer with a serious face telling me that the MPEG-4 Forum's licensing scheme is evil?
Of all thing, I would have thought that the events of the past four months would have given us all a sense of perspective. Blowing up buildings is malevolent. Killing people is malevolent. Charging a per-use-hour fee to your customers is business.
Get a grip.
Patents aren't like copyrights... yet.
If there's little that prevents Congress from having insanely long copyright terms, there's just as little preventing the same with patent terms.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
20 years ago, 20K of RAM in a "Personal Computer" was a REAL big deal.
No it wasn't. Even cheap, consumer-grade Atari computers had that much, and even the "stripped down" version had 16K.
Keep in mind how much MPEG1 is still in use and how old that is. It's getting dated, but not many are "laughing at it." MPEG4 may be the hot new thing, but it can't boast the ubiquity, stability, and portability that its ancestor can. Granted it's only twelve years old or so (compared to 17-20), but I really doubt MPEG4 will be on the scale of MPEG1 this year, next year, or the year after that.
You know, even though this is after all slashdot, I'm surprised that I haven't really seen anyone stick up for the MPEG consortium yet.
After all, they have worked for years to bring together technology from all over the world and synthesise it into something that is truly useful.
The kind of mathematics, science and engineering behind something like the MPEG standards isn't something you dream up in a bedroom - it takes a lot of time and money, and as time is money, this means money squared.
If they don't get their money back, then there won't be any more MPEG standards. At the end of the day, this is going to let people make lots of cash off of streaming video to people (whether it be via the net/cable/sat/whatever) - the people who enabled that deserve a reward.
I think it's pretty good of them to allow not-for-profit use of MPEG-4, which will allow people who aren't making money from their use of the technology to make as many MPEG-4 encoded videos as they like.
Sure, maybe the time based charging is dumb and should be rethought, or maybe it's actually pretty sensible (given the markets in which it'll be used, ie digital tv/video etc). The MPEG group is made up of a lot of extremely smart people - don't write them off because they aren't giving away their work into the public domain.
thanks -mike
A couple of observations I should have included, but forget are the following, relating classical economies to artificial scarcity.
RMS has been accused of being a communist because of his notions about intellectual property. However, communism has one great flaw: it seeks to redistribute existing scarce goods without creating incentive to eliminate the scarcity to begin with. That's why it appears to work so well at the beginning: it corrects a terribly skewed distribution of scarce things. While RMS attacks artificial scarcity, communism lumps natural scarcity in there as well. Note that combating natural scarcity requires the incentive to overcome the scarcity of knowledge of knowing how: once know, this knowledge can be kept artificially scarce (or not).
Capitalism, on the other hand, rewards those who can produce scarce goods. In theory, such goods will be delivered in the most efficient manner possible due to free market competition. The free market notion is nice because it does not create a have/have-not dichotomy, at least not in theory: anyone has the potential for success.
Of course, temporary extremes in both these economic models lead to undesireable circumstances that result in some form of government intervention: in the United States, we therefore have a mixed economy (note: many of the injustices attributed to capitalism and free markets can probably be attributed to "mismanagement" of this mixed economy -- this is why libertarians want less government). Recently, China has been experimenting with capitalist incentives within a predominantly communist economy. So, as presently practiced, communism and capitalism (both vulnerable to government corruption, though those of us in capitalist countries tend to think of communist governments are more corrupt), both seek to address scarcity issues, but in different ways. Personally, my bets are on a more capitalist incentive approach, because it offers the possibility of benefiting from short-term scarcity relief (i.e. "getting rich") as well as addressing the long term issues.
Finally, another way to look at the artificial scarcities is not as restrictions enforced by governments, but rather scarcities which do not remain so naturally: software is easy to copy. Heck, digital media in general is easy to copy. Information and knowledge are hard to keep secret. Such scarcities can only exist by the application of force or by concent. Absent concent, they are thus ultimately counterproductive to those who seek to exploit them too much.
You could've hired me.
You should consider posting an opinion piece like this as a link instead.
Apparently a lot of business types now get it into their heads, to implement some form of 'leasing' on their product, so they only have to work at it once, and then get paid untill hell freezes over (and with the amount of money you can make that way it'll be no problem to buy potential competition off before it can get big enough to stand a chance).
There's two reasons, why potential buyers of such schemes should abstain: The money comes out of their pockets, and throwing so much money in one direction will most probably create a monopolistic structure more concerned with keeping itself in control than making a better product (see Microsoft).
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Their ability to set licensing terms can be, and should be, regulated by government so that said licensing (if there's any at all) is strictly so as to achieve the maximum public benefit.
WHAT?? That's awfully Marx-esque, don't you think?
This is a capitalist system, and as such the only responsibilities that a business has is to maximize value for its shareholders and to comply with the laws of the jurisdiction(s) in which it operates.
This system is not perfect, but any system based on the premise that you advocate has been demonstrated to be ultimately a failure.
I like the old saying: capitalism is the second-worst economic system yet devised. The worst economic system is... everything else.