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."

Comments

To quote Barney...

[Dan Crash]

"It begins."

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 .MP? we have sitting on our hard drives.

I get a little more militant about this stuff every day. But I don't think I'm wrong, either.

Re:Economics of the past

[Proaxiom]

The flip side of this is that patents aren't like copyrights. They expire after 20 years or so, and become public domain.

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algorithms, but it's nice to know that you will always have free technology to use, although sometimes a little outdated.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)

old article

[rschroeder]

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

$.02 per hour....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Economics of the past

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

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.

Re:quicktime

[alannon]

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.

Re:Economics of the past

[cpt kangarooski]

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.