Can We Legislate Past the H.264 Debate?

Midnight Warrior writes "We could solve the H.264 debate if a country's legislature were to mandate that any patents that contribute to an industry-recognized standard were unenforceable in the application of that standard. Ideally, each standard would also be required to have a 'reference design' that could be used without further licensing. This could also solve problems with a ton of other deeply entrenched areas like hard drives, DRAM, etc. RAND tries to solve this strictly within industry, but both the presence of submarine patents and the low bar required to obtain a patent have made an obvious mess. Individual companies also use patent portfolios to set up mutually assured destruction. I'm not convinced that industry can solve this mess that government created. But I'm not stupid; this clearly has a broad ripple effect. Are there non-computer industries where this would be fatal? What if the patents were unenforceable only if the standard had a trademark and the implementer was compliant at the time of 'infringement'? Then, the patents could still be indirectly licensed, but it would force strict adherence to standards and would require the patent holders to fund the trademark group to defend it to the end. In the US model, of course."

Comments

The wrong end of the telescope

[westlake]

The stakeholders in H.264 are dominated by global industrial giants like Mitsubishi, NTT and Toshiba - about half are based in Korea and Japan. AVC/H.264 Licensors

In the list of 817 H.264 licensees, Japan, China and Korea are extraordinarily well represented in every category. OEM manufacturing. Brand name consumer and industrial tech. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution.

What I see in H.264 is vertical integration.

Encoders and decoders produced in the tens of millions for every product category.

Brand name consumer products. Cell phones. Webcams. Camcorders. Blu-Ray players. HDTVs. Set top boxes.

Industral and broadcast tech.

A search of Google Shopping for "H.264 WiFi Camera" - typically home security video - will return 1,600 hits.

Tell me how the geek stops this.

How he keeps the cheap, versatile, Asian H.264 product out of his home markets. How he does it without igniting a trade war.

 

Re:Uh huh

[BitZtream]

Use it to produce a indie movie, even with "pro" grade equipment and you're not.

By the time they care about your indie movie, you've made enough money that their fee is irrelevant.

Use it to produce a demo reel for your work, and you're not.

You are utterly and completely WRONG, unless you think uploading a video to youtube for the world to see is 'producing a demo reel for your work'. Of course Google already pays the fee and since they are actually the distributer, they are the responsible party.

Only parts of the generation or playback licensing have been paid for- you're on the hook for everything else and they'll enforce if you hit a certain threshold (about $100k of revenue of any kind generated from it...). They'll come mug you for money at that point and it's NOT cheap.

So basically, if you use it to dick around with your own personal stuff, they don't care ... but if you start marking a substantial amount of money they expect to get compensated for their work.

As for the price ...

Under the terms of the agreement, you have two options: a one-time payment of $2,500 “per AVC transmission encoder” or an annual fee starting at “$2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households, $5,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at least 500,000 but no more than 999,999 television households, and $10,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at 1,000,000 or more television households.”

So basically they want 2.5 centsfor each copy of a work you distribute using h264 AFTER 100k copies (Not $100k dollars by the way, so again, you don't know what you're talking about) ... Just how fucking cheap do you want it to be? 2.5 fucking cents dude ... get the fuck over it. At 1 million copies they want 1 cent.

Funny how people here will get all fucking uppity if someone doesn't like GPL or doesn't abide by GPL because they aren't contributing back ... and those same people will rant and rave that they have to give back to someone else in the form of money.

Next time do a brief google search before you start talking about shit you don't know about.

Re:No. Just pay up

[BitZtream]

Wrong. Nice FUD there buddy.

The license for h264 distribution is free until you hit 100k copies, at which point they want 2.5 cents or less per copy you distribute. You need to pay per distributed copy, so yes a DVD and a TV broadcast would count as two (or really the broadcast depends on number of views so in your case, I doubt you'd have to worry about that aspect)

Please to be getting a clue about the subject.

Re:F.U.D.

[westlake]

To make this a little more clear:

In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription),there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010),
and after the first term the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of
royalties payable during the same time for free television.

The broadcast license for a single station in markets over 1,000,000 households is $10,000/yr.

In markets of less than 100,000 households, a station can license AVC encoders for a one-time payment of $2,500 each - and that will be the end of it.

The enterprise license - for broadcast and cable media giants like Disney - maxes out at $5,000,000/yr.

Licenses are for five years, with a 10% cap on any increases on renewal.

There are the problems for your "free" codec of choice:

1 Google is a giant in Search.

Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Toshiba and the rest are giants in manufacturing.

Consumer goods. Industrial technologies.

H.264 hardware acceleration is available now or "coming soon" for everything from your cell phone to the 4Kx2K theatrical quality projector.

OEM hardware support is everything.

The geek builds his Field of Dreams player into a browser and prays for rain.

2 The free alternative needs miraculous "ten-thousand-angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin" compression before anyone will see a dime in savings on media, storage and transmission.

3 The free alternative needs editing and production tools as good as those available now from Adobe, Apple and Sony.

SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS

Re:How about the other way around?

[optikos]

But even more pertinent is the question, why is the W3C allowed to put H.264 in the HTML5 spec?

H.264 is so popular with all mainstream-consumer standards bodies because its decode path's entire traffic-plane (with a rich set of hardware registers to the software control-plane in the device driver) is widely implemented in hardware, and the encode path is likewise implemented in hardware nearly as often. Competing standards' video traffic-planes are usually implemented entirely in software without any custom-hardware assist, which causes at least a decimal order of magnitude more power consumption and likewise at least a decimal orders of magnitude more performance burden on software. These excess orders of magnitude of additional effort in software erode battery life. Right now extending battery life is viewed as more important than extending the WWW's socio-political agenda. The standards are rewarding H.264's extreme efficiency in multiple dimensions. The electronics industry is rewarding H.264's extremely wide standards-adoption to more certainly recover their multi-millions of dollars/euros of non-recoverable engineering (NRE) costs of developing these ASICs. Is it a grand conspiracy against your socio-political agenda or is it merely a textbook example of a win-win engineering/business-model sweet-spot?

The whole premise of the web is that its specifications are open (i.e. royalty free), and that is one of the reasons it has become so popular.

The whole premise of being in business is to maximize profit, not pursue some sociopolitical agenda of transferring all ownership of the means of production to "the people". If you don't think that the most-widely-deployed most-highly-efficient greatest-quality-of-experience products are the goal (for greatest recovery of NRE by the most-affordable business model to satisfy the most paying-customers), then by definition you are something other than an engineer (even if someone in management & HR strokes your ego by putting the word "engineer" in your job title).

Glossary: In the teledatacom industry [which includes the telephone network and the Internet (as pure inter-LAN data network) and the converged data-audio-video-signaling/routing-management network], the traffic-plane (a.k.a. data-plane a.k.a. user-plane) is where the end-user's bits are for, say, TCP or UDP payload, audio telephone call, or video feed, all of which are customarily in hardware for speed, electrical-power-consumption, and thermal-dissipation reasons. The control-plane is typically the software (device-driver) that controls (i.e., indirectly governs via look-up tables, where the hardware is doing the looking up) how the hardware itself switches the ingressing information flows to the egressing information flows, including inter-network-element signaling & routing that establish or tear-down information flows. The management plane is how the ISP or telco or carrier conveys command that configure the network-elements throughout their network. Nowadays, a everything from PDAs & iPad to PCs/Mac to servers likewise borrow a miniaturized variant of this traffic-plane in hardware plus control-plane device driver plus GUI management-plane ideology. This posting is at the heart of what Steve Jobs has been saying about the iPad regarding H.264 versus Flash.

Re:No

[evilviper]

I'd say the GP's option is far better.

It is indeed much better for one group... And vastly, horrendously worse for another group...

The question is, is it ethically okay to steal so much from group B, and give it to group A.

Kicking a Gift Horse

[gig]

In the late 1990's, Linux users complained they could not see Internet video because it was all QuickTime format with commercial Sorenson codec.

So Apple gave the QuickTime file format to MPEG for standardization, and it is now ISO/IEC standardized. A vendor-neutral codec was created. MPEG-4 replaced the DVD. Apple's iTunes Store did not ship QuickTime, they shipped MPEG-4.

Now, Linux users can see Internet video. But now they're complaining that it's not in the nonstandard Ogg they prefer. Never mind that on a technical level, this would be like demanding that Linux users switch to DOS 3.3.

MPEG-4 is totally free for non-commercial use. If you don't make money from it, you don't pay. If you make money, you kickback a tiny portion of it to fund development of the codec. It pays for itself because you can sell more video to people who can see it than otherwise. The fees are very low. Nobody has built a better alternative. Nobody can say "here is how you should have done it" because nobody else has done it. These Ogg fantasies are embarrassing. Show us the fucking code! You can't, because Ogg has atrophied for a decade while people in audio video built and distributed the equivalent of an online DVD and made the world rich with online video. Ogg is just the WMV of Linux.

This debate really shows that you can't please political extremists and religious fundamentalists.