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

MPEG2, then

[1010011010]

It looks like they are breathing more life into MPEG2, then. "Use fee" for a data format? That's supposedly a standard? Right.

Re:MPEG2, then

[sacherjj]

One thing I haven't seen asked is how does this affect DivX? That is MPEG4, right? Just a freely developed version... Why doesn't everyone just switch to DivX?

Re:MPEG2, then

[Whelkman]

Why doesn't everyone just switch to DivX?

The legality of DivX is questionable. First off, it was orignally based on Microsoft's ASF format (a simple hack to put the codec into an AVI file). Next, Project Mayo re-developed it into their own implementation, complete with an "open source" license. However, once the project got far enough, Project Mayo shut down the CVS. Soon after they made a commercial product out of it. Yes, you can still download 4.0 alpha 50, but it's a year old.

So, not only does DivX use (or did use) "stolen technology" from Microsoft, the project centers around stolen code garnered from lies and deception. On top of that, it is an MPEG4 implementation of sorts, so usage of it probably requires licensing fees.

That's why "everyone doesn't just switch to DivX."

Economics of the past

[Dutchmaan]

I'm wondering in the next 10 years how many things we'll no longer own, but be charged as we use them.

I think there was a word for this kind of situation...

Serfdom

Only this time we pay to a CEO instead of a "Lord"

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algorithms, but it's nice to know that you will always have free technology to use, although sometimes a little outdated.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

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:Economics of the past

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

The LZW patent is set to expire at the end of this year

Not according to this it's not. The patent was granted in 1985. 1985+20=2005. Or you could read at Unisys itself.

~

It wasn't a solution or a proposal.

I know, bad wording. Sorry ,man.

~

MPEG-4 will be exactly the same algorithm in a decade as it is now.

You are 100% correct, but my point is no one will care. We will have GREATLY moved on by then, and the guts of MP4 will be very little more than an eye-brow raiser.

Re:Economics of the past

[Kozz]

Well, Microsoft and Panasonic have already developed a Pay-Per-Use DVD player. It should be the wave of the future.

Re:Economics of the past

[foobar104]

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.

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.

Re:Economics of the past

[Whelkman]

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.

Re:Economics of the past

[Zeinfeld]

Not according to this [surrey.ac.uk] it's not. The patent was granted in 1985. 1985+20=2005. Or you could read at Unisys [unisys.com] itself.

Bzzt! The law is 17 years from issue or 20 years from filing, whichever is longer. The filing date on 4,558,302 is June 20, 1983, the issue date is December 10, 1985.

So the patent expires on the later of Dec 10, 2002 or June 20 2003.

What I don't quite understand is why anyone would use MPEG 4 under the proposed license instead of MPEG 2. Chances are that devices will have to support MPEG2 far into the future. It is not very likely that MPEG4 will offer such a devastating improvement in performance that many will be paying 2 cents an hour.

The problem with razor and blades type business models is that they are only good for the seller. Given the choice the customer will strategise to avoid razor and blades type models. Polaroid has gone chapter 11 because people prefer to pay $300 for a good digital camera that costs $0.00 per shot rather than pay $30 for a Polaroid camera and $1 for every shot they take.

Re:Economics of the past

[foobar104]

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.

You can't GPL an algorithm

[Proaxiom]

Algorithms are patented, not copyrighted, so you can't decide how you license it like that.

The way to patent an algorithm is to first invent it. For fractal compression, you're too late.

You can write a compression program and GPL it, but first you have to be careful not to infringe on anyone else's patents.

Here is a fractal decoder license. I believe Iterated Systems Inc. holds a pretty comprehensive patent on fractal compression, but I don't have much in the way of details.

Confused

[DarkEdgeX]

How will this affect things such as DivX which use MPEG4 in their CODEC(s)? Wouldn't such a fee system preclude them from giving away the encoder/decoder (or atleast the encoder)?

Re:When will they learn?

[RagManX]

When will you learn that Slashdot is a fringe element of society and does not represent the global view. Personally I have CD players, VCRs, DVDs, and TVs that I know contain several dollars of licensing fees each: BIG SHIT. Seriously, who gives a fuck? It pays the people to develop this.

I think the point of contention with this licensing is that someone will now have to pay for creating content, as well as for devices which create or view the content. Now, companies will be able to sell us video viewers for less than ever before, but we'll have fewer videos to watch, because companies won't want to pay the licensing fee to provide the content to us.

RagManX

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.

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

Re:quicktime

[SComps]

People tend to vote with their feet. This is evident with Windows XP (sales may be good but they're definitely not what Bill expected). With the current system, it'll be easy to just stay with what I've got. I don't need to change, or pay by the hour. The installed software base is already there; on both the server and client side. While they may want to make us pay for MPEG-4, they can't force us to use it...

I may be way overly simplistic in this, but we don't *need* to blast off into the future unless we actually *want* to. Nothing is stopping us from doing this stuff now, and hell standards are only standards if we accept them.

$.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.

Pay to create content

[Lysander Luddite]

So know the distributors/providers of content have to pay a charge based on the length of material. Won't this charge be passed onto the content creators? How does this encourage people to use this format?

And if content creators have to pay more (raising their costs) won't there be a shift to more centralized content ownership? It'll be the big guys (MPAA and RIAA) that can pay these fees.

$.02/hour doesn't sound much but is that per stream? So I am paying more for being popular? How does that help amateurs or people who want to create content professionally?

I swear paying more for "pro" equipment that is hobbled simply to allow recording in digital formats is criminal enough. Now I have to pay another group simply because I use an "open" file format?

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.

Just those owners making money

[drkich]

US $0.00033/minute or portion (equivalent to US $0.02/hour) based on playback/normal running time for every stream, download or other use of MPEG-4 video data in connection with which a service provider or content owner receives remuneration as a result of offering/providing the video for viewing or having the video viewed (including without limitation pay-per-view, subscription and advertiser/underwriter-supported services(

If you are getting paid for the download of your MPEG-4 video data, then you have to pay. Otherwise you can distribute the video for free.

Now of course the devil's in the details, they say at the end, "(including without limitation pay-per-view, subscription and advertiser/underwriter-supported services)" Which could be taken to mean that if you have ANY advertising on your site, you have to pay.

Ogg Tarkin

[MenTaLguY]

I suppose this licensing descision will provide more impetus for the development of Ogg Tarkin.

Another sign that these guys JUST DON'T GET IT

[rutledjw]

Between this absurdity and the W3C (talk about yet another organization which has become utterly worthless) trying to implment licensing fees on thier stuff we're going to end up in an open world.

Am I a zealot? Perhaps. But, think of it this way - why did TCP/IP become "the" networking standard? Because IBM was sucking the life out of people with SNA. The same will happen here.

There is no "value added" (nice little overused consulting term) when people use a technology that has this kind of licensing scheme. In the end, technology like this is used to support a service. In this case: Streaming Video. If there's an Open or free (as in beer) alternative, why not use that technology instead?

These guys are setting the precedent for their own demise. They do not have the clout to demand such license arrangements and maintain market share. Such an absurd tactic will only add fuel to the fire to use other standards, perhaps such as the Ogg Vorbis effort...

Not wanting to needlessly bring up the Beast here, but they too have been trying to establish a similar control over electronic media through their wma (is that right?) standard. This is NOT a one front attack, but one with many seperate, but similar, efforts to control and hence, bill a new industry (eletronic &| streaming media).

I'm not anti-captialistic, quite the contrary, but I don't see the need to pay for something where it brings little or no value to me...

Here are the Licensing Terms

[InfoVore]

I found the following news release with the licensing terms here:

For Immediate Release
CONTACT:
Lawrence Horn
MPEG LA®
301.986.6660
301.986.8575 Fax
lhorn@mpegla.com

Terms of MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License Announced

(Denver, Colorado, US - 31 January 2002) - MPEG LA, LLC today announced that it will offer fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory, worldwide access to patents that are essential to the MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) digital compression standard under a single license to be known as the MPEG-4 (Visual) Patent Portfolio License ("License"). The License currently includes patents owned by the following companies: Canon Inc.; France Télécom; Fujitsu Limited; Hitachi, Ltd.; Hyundai Curitel, Inc.; KDDI Corporation; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.; Microsoft Corporation; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.; Philips Electronics; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd.; Sharp Kabushiki Kaisha; Sony Corporation; Telenor AS; Toshiba Corporation; and Victor Company of Japan, Limited. MPEG LA convened these patent owners in December 2000 following an independent patent expert's finding that each of them owns one or more patents essential to the international MPEG-4 Visual Standard. The objective of the License is to include as much essential MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) intellectual property as possible in one license for the convenience of all users. Patent holders are required to include all of their essential MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) patents worldwide. In addition, new patent holders and their essential patents will continue to be added following a determination of essentiality.

"The essential patent owners are pleased that their intellectual property has made a substantial and essential contribution to the development of this exciting new technology," said MPEG LA Chief Executive Officer Baryn S. Futa. "The MPEG-4 (Visual) Patent Portfolio License manifests their desire to 'partner' with other industry participants to encourage widespread adoption of MPEG-4. The patent owners understand the risks inherent in a startup technology in which companies large and small are asked to make a pioneering investment and are sensitive to the role that their licensing model will play in that process. Therefore, the License has been specially designed so that reasonable royalties are shared fairly by a variety of industry participants in order to stimulate early, rapid and widespread MPEG-4 product investment, development, deployment and use."

Under the License terms, Licensees will pay the following royalty rates for MPEG-4 Simple or Core Products:
US $0.25 per decoder (in hardware or software) for a license to make and sell and for personal use in receiving private video (i.e., not video for which a service provider or content owner receives remuneration as a result of offering/providing the video for viewing or having the video viewed), subject to a cap of $1,000,000 per year/per legal entity.
US $0.25 per encoder (in hardware or software) for a license for personal use only to create private video data (i.e., not video for which a service provider or content owner receives remuneration as a result of offering/providing the video for viewing or having the video viewed), subject to a cap of $1,000,000 per year/per legal entity.
US $0.00033/minute or portion (equivalent to US $0.02/hour) based on playback/normal running time for every stream, download or other use of MPEG-4 video data in connection with which a service provider or content owner receives remuneration as a result of offering/providing the video for viewing or having the video viewed (including without limitation pay-per-view, subscription and advertiser/underwriter-supported services). This royalty, to be paid by entities that disseminate the MPEG-4 video data, is not subject to a cap. (In the case of MPEG-4 video for which the number of uses cannot be directly determined (e.g., video supplied as part of a basic cable service or to a transmitter for broadcasting), a surrogate (e.g., standard industry audience measurement) is under consideration.)
US $0.00033/minute or part (equivalent to US $0.02/hour) based on playback/normal running time of MPEG-4 video data encoded (for other than personal use) on each copy of packaged medium. This royalty, to be paid by the packaged medium replicator, is not subject to a cap.
For one year from the start date of the license program, parties that sign the license (or a memorandum of intent to sign a license) will be forgiven their payment of royalties for all MPEG-4 Visual Simple and Core products during and before that one year period.
The initial term of the License has not yet been finalized but when decided, will be subject to renewal on reasonable terms and conditions for the useful life of any patents in the Portfolio.

In agreeing to the foregoing terms, the patent holders considered the need for simplicity, promoting the widest possible use of MPEG-4, maximizing the opportunity for full efficient compliance with intellectual property licensing requirements and recognition of the likely business models for deploying MPEG-4 Visual Standard technology so as to assure that the License is aligned with the real-world flow of MPEG-4 commerce.
As the objective of the MPEG-4 (Visual) Patent Portfolio License is to include as much essential MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) intellectual property as possible in one license, MPEG LA reiterates that any party that believes it has essential patents (Sections 9, 9.1 and 9.2 and Tables 9-1 and 9-2 of ISO\IEC 14496-2 Information Technology - Coding of Audio-Visual Objects - Part 2: Visual) and wishes to join upon successful evaluation, is invited to submit such patents to the independent Patent Evaluator together with a statement confirming its agreement with the objectives and intention to abide by terms and procedures governing the patent submission process, which may be obtained from Lawrence A. Horn, Vice President, Licensing and Business Development, MPEG LA, LLC (lhorn@mpegla.com, phone 1-301-986-6660, fax 1-301-986-8575).

# # #
Overview of the MPEG-4 Standard

MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC multi-media representation standard developed by its Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). MPEG also developed MPEG-1, which makes possible interactive video on CD-ROM and is present on virtually every personal computer, and MPEG-2, the core compression technology underlying the efficient transmission, storage and display of digitized moving images and sound tracks on which high definition television (HDTV), Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), direct broadcast by satellite (DBS), digital cable television systems, multichannel-multipoint distribution services (MMDS), personal computer video, digital versatile discs (DVD), interactive media and other forms of digital video delivery, storage, transport and display are based.

MPEG-4 is the result of yet another international effort involving hundreds of researchers and engineers from all over the world. Building on the successes of MPEG's earlier standards, MPEG-4 enables integration of the production, distribution and content access features of digital television, interactive graphics applications and interactive multimedia across internet protocol, wireless, low bitrate, broadcast, satellite, cable and mobile environments. With MPEG-4, all content elements can be maintained as discrete objects enabling richer interactivity and use across many different devices More information about MPEG-4 can be found at MPEG's home page http://www.cselt.it/mpeg and at the home page of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum http://www.m4if.org.

MPEG LA, LLC

MPEG LA successfully pioneered one-stop technology standards licensing, starting with a portfolio of essential patents for the international digital video compression standard known as MPEG-2, which it began licensing in 1997. One-stop technology standards licensing enables widespread technological implementation, interoperability and use of fundamental broad-based technologies covered by many patents owned by many different patent holders. MPEG LA provides users with fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory access to these essential patents on a worldwide basis under a single license. The MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License now has more than 360 licensees and includes more than 400 MPEG-2 essential patents in 39 countries owned by 20 patent holders. As the legal and business template for one-stop technology standards licensing, MPEG LA also provides an innovative way to achieve fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory access to patent rights for other technology standards - the high-speed transfer digital interconnect standard known as IEEE 1394 and the terrestrial digital television standard used in Europe and Asia known as DVB-T. In addition, MPEG LA has been asked to facilitate the development of joint licenses for other MPEG-4 technologies. The company is based in Denver, CO and has offices in Chevy Chase, MD (Washington DC metropolitan area), the greater San Francisco area and London, England. For more information, please refer to http://www.mpegla.com, http://www.dvbla.com, and http://www.1394la.com.

More like June 20, 2003 in USA

[yerricde]

The patent was granted in 1985. 1985+20=2005

You're assuming granted plus 20 years plus end of calendar year. This is not the case in the United States. For some U.S. patents, the equation is filed plus 20; for others, it's granted plus 17. According to US Patent 4,558,302, filed plus 20 = June 20, 2003, and granted plus 20 = December 10, 2002. (Unlike copyrights, patents do not extend to the end of the calendar year.) To be safe, use the later date.

The patent owners CAN kill DivX

[yerricde]

One thing I haven't seen asked is how does this affect DivX? That is MPEG4, right?

But MPEG4 algorithms are independent of the particular implementation. If the licensing terms for MPEG4 do not permit licensing end-user products as free software, then open DivX as we know it will cease to exist in the United States, and some of the developers will move on to Ogg Tarkin.

Just a freely developed version

That doesn't matter. Unisys has publicly declared that it will not license the LZW patents to developers of free software: "For example, the typical Unisys license for standalone software does NOT permit copying, modification, resale, use on a server or in a network, or use for Internet/Intranet/Extranet or Web site operation."

That's the kind of EULA I would R*E*J*E*C*T

[yerricde]

Here is a fractal decoder license.

I can't see why a fellow could in his right mind accept this license. It prohibits installation on SMP machines: "has one Intel 386, 486 or Pentium processor, Motorola 68036 or 68040 processor or IBM Power PC processor." Note: That's "68036" (nonexistent), not 68030, and not Motorola PowerPC (such as some PPC G4). It prohibits installation on dual-boot machines or on WINE: "operates only the Microsoft DOS and Windows operating system or the Macintosh operating system." It prohibits installation on machines whose primary keyboard is a wireless keyboard: "contains a keyboard (not an infrared remote)." It prohibits installation on machines that do not have a printer attached: "is able to produce printed output on a local printer." It prohibits installation on machines that have even one Windows share on them: "does not act as a server on any network."

Artificial Scarcity

[renehollan]

I've been thinking about these kinds of things for a while now, and while I haven't examined the ramifications of the ideas that I'm about to share with any great rigor, I still think they are worth sharing.

RMS believes that software should be free, that agreeing to not share code one has, or to not be able to study and modify it is immoral. Basically, the world is a better place with free software than without. As a libertarian, I have a strong sense of property rights so I don't accept this view outright. Yet, because I am a libertarian, I also accept the idea that those who wish to produce free software not be impeded from doing so, and note that this is indeed helpful. So, I ask myself, "In what kind of society are restrictions on software use and distribution clearly wrong"?

The answer is a post-scarcity society (well, not really, but I'll get to that and why) -- one where no one wants for anything: replicators (for example) run on abundant (i.e. more than enough) solar power and employ nano-technology to make whatever anyone desires: food, clothing, shelter.

O.K. This is an artificial construct, to be sure, but bear with me.

In such a society, hoarding software, or licensing it under restrictive terms clearly harms those who want it, but can't have it. Why would one do this? To exact some price for it? But that is meaningless: one can already have anything one wants, and any price exacted could be met for the same reason. To deprive others of something that costs one nothing, and anyone could afford is not nice: its like throwing away perfectly good scraps of food that one can't eat or save when others are starving and it is no effort to give it away to them.

So, the only justification for restrictions on software, or the creation of an artificial scarcity of it (or anything else, for that matter: information in general) is the need to compensate for a natural scarcity -- if I write code for free, I can't earn a traditional living, and so can't affort scarce goods, like food. Writing free code costs me, in other words, and that cost needs to be mitigated.

So, the justification for artificial scarcity is a compensation for natural scarcity: if one can produce something in abundance for themselves, but limit its availability to others, one can avoid seeking other scarce things, through a mechanism of trade.

On the other hand, does this mean that it is acceptable to others that the artificial scarcity ber permitted to last indefinately? After all, this means a gravy train for life for some while others struggle in a world of scarcity? Traditionally, most people have said "No," and have enacted laws to deal with such artificial scarcities.

Before software, artificial scarcities existed for other things, like writings and the applications of inventions, namely copyrights, and patents. There was no infinite property right recognized for ideas by society, or its governing representatives -- the stable state is that of public domain, tending to lessen scarcity.

Artificial scarcities, like copyright and patents, were inventions of government, granted and enforced for limited durations, in order to reflect the realities of living iin a naturally scarce world, yet to encourage the eventual lessening of scarcities, otherwise known as progress.

While philosophically, I might object at the arbitrary imposition of a limit on copyright and patent, preferring instead to see a negotiation of terms acceptable creator and user, I nevertheless recognize that such intellectual property should not remain proprietary forever. Pragmatically, the "market force" of negotiation, civil or otherwise, establishes a flow from the haves to the have-nots: governments, empowered with the legal use of force, dictate terms, and mobs forcibly revolt when they have "enough" (distinguishing a mob from a government is left up to the reader).

Note that this applies to anything that can be made artificially scare, or restricted by license: writings, software, drug formulas, etc. The bottom line is that artificial scarcity is justified only by overall scarcity and it is desirable to reduce scarcity overall. Thus, artificial scarcity is like debt: useful, but not something of which one wants an excess.

Now, this analysis does break down to some extent in that there will never be a completely post-scarcity society: things that can be envisioned, but do not exist, will remain scarce, and artificial scarcity can encourage people to continue to try to invent. But, the principle that artificial scarcity be limited in duration remains.

The natural state, then is public domain, and this is what we should strive toward. Note, that the GPL is not the same as public domain, in that free software can not be employed in non-free derived works. But the teeth behind that are the same teeth that generate copyright-based artificial scarcity to begin with. If copyright and patent protection were substantially weakened, would the GPL need to be so restrictive? I don't think so -- it is as protective of fighting artificial scarcity as copyright is of promoting it: a rather nice balance.

So, what does all this mean? Instead of changing the free software mantra, we should be arguing for a recognition that artificial scarcity property rights, propped up by government should be temporary in nature, as a matter of principle, and shorter terms are better for society than longer terms. This is the exact opposite of recent trends. People need to be educated that the acceptance of artificial scarcities in their lives is like taking on debt.

These are only partially-baked ideas, so I appologize for the roughness of thought, but I certainly welcome comments.

The different MPEG-4 Codecs.

[joeytsai]

The number of mpeg-4 implementations out there is pretty frightening, and so I wrote up a quick write-up of the most popular. Please let me know if you spot anything incorrect.

The ASF file format is based on Microsoft's MPEG-4 V2 codec.

The "DivX ;-)" codec is based off of Microsoft's MPEG-4 V3 codec. This is
sometimes referred to as the 3.x codec. This is the format that requires
Win32 DLLs. This is the format most people are talking about when they say
"DivX". Most movies floating around the internet are encoded in this format.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage
http://divx.euro.ru

Project Mayo is developing an implementation called OpenDivX, which is GPL.
This is a rewrite (to lose the dependency on the Win32 DLLs, trying to make it
100% legal) and is sometimes referred to as the 4.x codec. This version is
backward-compatible with 3.x, but 3.x is not forward-compatible with 4.x
OpenDivX is under development, and still has quality and performance issues.
http://www.projectmayo.com

DivX Advanced Research Centre (DARC) has an implentation called DivX4. DARC and
Project Mayo are both part of a companly called DivXNetworks. Apparently,
OpenDivX was a sort of sandbox where DARC figured out what worked and what
didn't, and used that to create DivX4 from scratch. It is closed source, but
freely downloadable. DivX4 is reported to have very high image quality.
http://www.divxnetworks.com

3ivx has a self-named MPEG-4 implementation. They also refer to it as DivX 2.0.
Their implementation is closed source, and only the decoder is freely available
(in Windows, as a Windows Media Player or QuickTime plug-in; in Linux, as an
XAnim plug-in). You cannot play a DivX movie with the 3ivx codec.
http://www.3ivx.com

Nandub in an encoder which sports the Smart Bitrate Control (SBC) method of
encoding DivX. Nandub is a modified version of the VirtualDub program (which is
a general AVI editing and capture tool). Both Nandub and VirtualDub are
released under the GPL. SBC is not a codec, it's an encoding method based from
DivX 3.x which generally yields higher quality than normal.
http://www.nandub.org
http://www.virtualdub.org

The FFmpeg project has another rewritten from scratch MPEG-4 codec. They are
striving for real time encoding, and their code (GPLed) is written in ANSI C for
portability.
http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net

Don't they deserve it?

[IamTheRealMike]

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

Re:Don't they deserve it?

[barfy]

Your right it does cost money.
There are 14 million DSS customers, and probably lets say 10 million Digital Cable customers.

That would make the mpeg 2 licenses so far on the line upwards of $50 MILLION dollars. That pays for ALOT of academic research.

Now if those folks get transferred to mpeg4 (which there is a pretty high desireability from a consumer standpoint, more effective use of bandwidth means more and better channels), that goes from $50 million dollars of licensing fees to at the rate of lets say 8 cents a day to a licensing rate of 3 million dollars a day, or over a billion dollars a year.

Oh yeah, everyone deserves a billion dollars a year for licensing fees.

With fees as rich as that, no one will pay them. Either customers will not get access to mpeg4 technology, or a cheaper technology will be developed. Either way the mpeg folks won't get thier billions.

Re:Artificial Scarcity - Part II

[renehollan]

Gee, thanks for the mod points, but I'd really like to see discussion.

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.

Thesis

[jxqvg]

You should consider posting an opinion piece like this as a link instead.

Re:When will they learn?

[MadAhab]

Of course in the grand closed source scheme, to avoid actual competition or production of useful goods and services, the IP fanatics will, rather than, say, write the best compression scheme, lay broad patent and IP claims all over the place and claim that the entire area of video compression schemes is their god-given territory and that it is their manifest destiny to rape and exploit it to the detriment of all others . Of course, it totally refutes the capitalist foundations that their whole little pigopoly is built on, but ignore that...

And what about no-software-patents countries?

[JCCyC]

If I set up a MPEG4 streaming server in a country who does not recognize software patents (like mine ;) I can solemny ignore patent holders, right?

And if they complain that citizens of the USA can view my videos, I'll just say (or rather instruct my lawyer to say) "Do you... Yahoo?"

MPEG2 is the oldest codec EVER!

[blazin]

According to the license info page the royalty scheme is determined by date, apparently starting on September 1, 1001 and going until March 1, 2003. Now I don't know a lot about patents, copyright law, and what not, but over 1001 years to be having all the rights on a patent seems a bit crazy...

<SNIP>
(5) For MPEG-2 Packaged Media, the royalty is US $0.04 before September 1, 2001/$0.035 from September 1, 1001 to March 1, 2003/$0.03 from March 1, 2003 for the first MPEG-2 Video Event, plus $0.01 for each additional 30 minutes or portion recorded on the same copy...

Work for a year, get paid for eternity ...

[gotan]

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).
--

Re:Linux is only free if your time is worthless...

[renehollan]

Yes, of course, but what could you reward one with in a post-scarcity, or limited-scarcity society?

Time would cease to have value because there's nothing it could be traded for -- you wouldn't loose work time because you would not have to work.

The point is, having created a piece of software, there would be no justification for hoarding it because you couldn't get anything in exchange for it that you didn't already have.

Actually, that isn't quite true: you could trade it for things that are promised, but don't exist -- other software. But you wouldn't need to trade it for food, clothing, or shelter.

Artificial scarcity begets ongoing scarcity, and that is the argument for limiting it's duration.

"No royalty" != free software

[yerricde]

In certain cases, no license fees may be required

OK, so that potentially makes LZW-writing software gratis, but gratis != free. As I stated above, the typical Unisys LZW license "does NOT permit copying [or] modification" and thus prohibits use of LZW technology in free software as defined by FSF or by the Debian social contract.

There are fewer than 17 months left in the U.S. patent on LZW, which expires no later than June 20, 2003 (filed + 20 years).

Re:Artificial Scarcity - Part II

[Fjord]

traditionally monopolies tend to die of their own weight within 15 years

This really don't fint with my understanding of the history in this country. The rail companies in the 1800s had monopolies lasting well longer than this. Even if this is true, the problem with monopolies isn't the fact that they are monopolies, but that they can often use this status to control and hurt the marketplace. It's only in these cases where they have violated the law, and we shouldn't just let them do it because they'll be gone in less than 15 years, likely replaced by a new monopoly