Slashdot Mirror
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."
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"
"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.
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
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.
The world according to SComps
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.
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?
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.
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.
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
I suppose this licensing descision will provide more impetus for the development of Ogg Tarkin.
DNA just wants to be free...
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...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
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.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
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."
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
You could've hired me.
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.
;-)" codec is based off of Microsoft's MPEG-4 V3 codec. This is
The ASF file format is based on Microsoft's MPEG-4 V2 codec.
The "DivX
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
http://www.talknerdy.org
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...
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
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...