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MPEG LA Announces Permanent Royalty Moratorium For H264

Posted by timothy on from the free-samples dept.

vistapwns writes "MPEG LA has announced that free h264 content (vs. paid h264 content which will still have royalties) will be royalty free forever. With ubiquitous h264 support on mobile devices, personal computers and all other types of media devices, this assures that h264 will remain the de facto standard for video playback for the foreseeable future."

8 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Paging lawyers by oldhack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is this one of those soft "pledges" that's not worth the paper it's written on, or is this something legally binding?

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
    1. Re:Paging lawyers by John+Whitley · · Score: 5, Informative

      Is this one of those soft "pledges" that's not worth the paper it's written on, or is this something legally binding?

      Any attempt by the MPEG-LA to renege on this grant (a massive public announcement within this industry) would be blocked by Estoppel (at least in legal systems which have that concept). Plus MPEG-LA has the additional deterrent that the backlash would be exactly what they're trying to avoid, only worse: it would promote market fear of H.264 for web use, forcing one of the format's competitors to rise to the forefront.

  2. Oh snap. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ok. Looks like Google wins this one. Basically, for ~100 million, was it, for On2, they get some tech that might possibly be interesting, and they get a bargaining chip that just made youtube immune to MPEG LA royalties.

  3. Excludes any comercial interests. Bad Summary-- by LordFolken · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comerical usage will still be subject to royalities. This is basically to get the people hooked on h264 so that streaming sites in the future need to pay roaylities. This is a common problem with "defacto" standards.

    1. Re:Excludes any comercial interests. Bad Summary-- by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's a little broader: it appears to allow any "free-to-view" internet video to use the codecs royalty-free, even if that video is being used to make money through e.g. ads. It does exclude video where users are paying to watch it, like Hulu.

      From the license summary [pdf], which hasn't yet been updated to indicate the indefinite moratorium:

      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 the following term (ending December 31, 2015), after which the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of the royalties payable during the same time for free television.

      Commercial usage, even without charging end users, off the internet, e.g. with free television broadcasts, still requires royalties.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  4. Still Requires Licensing! by pavon · · Score: 5, Informative

    This announcement changes little. First, it is still uncertain whether videos served on pages will be required to pay royalties, so YouTube may very well still be required to pay royalties. More importantly, developers of H.264 encoders/decoders are still are required to pay patent licenses, regardless of whether they make money or not. This makes it impossible to have legal open source implementations of H.264 in the US anywhere that respects our patents. That is the complaint that Mozilla and Opera had against H.264 and so this minor licensing change will have no affect on the appropriateness of H.264 as an web standard.

  5. Re:Pirating n00b here... by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Informative

    H.264 is the name of the standard.

    x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format.

  6. Bad article title, bad summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The MPEG LA hasn't announced a "permanent royalty moratorium for H.264" at all. They've announced that they will not collect royalties for one particular use case. You still need to pay royalties for the encoder. You still need to pay royalties for the decoder. You still need to pay royalties for streaming commercial video. Since the MPEG LA wasn't yet collecting royalties on video streamed for free nothing has changed here. Recognise this for what it is: the usage of open, royalty-free video is rising on the web and the MPEG LA is worried about that. I don't have Flash installed anymore because increasingly I don't need it. I only ever used it for web video and these days I watch all web video in Ogg Theora or WebM natively in my browser.