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WebM Licensing Problems Resolved
breser writes "The WebM licensing problems have been resolved. The copyright license is straight BSD now, and the patent license is separate and has no impact on the copyright license. Quoting Chris DiBona: 'As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do. Using patent language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses, in this new iteration of the patent clause we've decoupled patents from copyright, thus preserving the pure BSD nature of the copyright license. This means we are no longer creating a new open source copyright license, and the patent grant can exist on its own.'"
I'm glad that that issue has now been settled. When do we start seeing extensive adoption of WebM and ditching of the H.264 and others?
There's no doubt that Google has made an effort to make its licensing terms more consistent and compatible with existing FOSS licenses. Maybe some of this could have been resolved beforehand if Google had talked to such organizations as the OSI and FSF.
But one important problem remains even with the new licensing terms: there's no indemnification or holding harmless in the event of patent-related problems. I asked at the end of this blog post whether it would be fair for Google to reap most of the rewards if WebM becomes a success while the commercial adopters of WebM would bear the risk in case things go wrong on the patent front. By not even providing some basic indemnification, Google calls into question that it's really sure there aren't going to be any problems.
I am no expert on licenses, but according to GNU, the 3-clause BSD license used by WebM is GPL-compatible. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
If you read their page they specifically deny any indemnification. They note you won't be sued by and of the MPEG-LA members, of course, but if there are other patents, well you are on your own. So supposing Google held a patent over something H.264 uses and decided to sue you, well you'd be SOL and have to defend it yourself.
You only tend to find indemnification clauses in the case of very large companies, and then when the more or less developed the technology themselves are fare fairly confident that they hold all the cards.
So no, there's no indemnification of WebM. However what you do have is Google's statement that they carefully checked VP8 before and after buying On2 and they think it is clear. Google is the one company that has the resources to conduct a search like that efficiently, and they have good reason not to release this unless they are confident, as they will for sure be someone that would get sued as they have lots of money.
Also, their patent revocation license means that people might have trouble suing over WebM. So say Sony decides to sue. However it turns out their laptops have an ATi graphics chip in them that accelerates WebM (ATi has said they are going to do that). Well Sony has now lost the right to those patents and is open to countersuit. Nothing they can easily do about it, either, as nVidia is also in with WebM.
Google seems pretty confident they are in the clear, I think it is reasonable for everyone else to feel confident.