'Free' H.264 a Precursor To WebM Patent War?

webmink writes "The MPEG LA seem unwilling to explain why they have extended their 'free' H.264 streaming video policy now. This article unpacks the history of MPEG LA and then suggests the obvious — it's all because of WebM — and the worrying — maybe it's preparing the ground for opening a third front in the patent war against Google."

Comments

It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Adolf Hitroll]

Stop the press. This is not news.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[blackest_k]

The third link has a good explanation of why h264 isn't really free.
First thing to be noted is that any deal they offer today can be withdrawn in five years anyway.
The free bit is only that they will not bill the end user.
the encoding is not free
the streaming is not free
and the decoding is absolutely not free.
The last one means any browser wishing to offer this functionality has to pay for it and unfortunatly it can't pass on the patent protection granted by paying for this so there is no way for firefox to offer this.

So really we should say no to h264 and hope google doesn't get creamed in its patent battles.
     

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[DurendalMac]

the encoding is not free

Unless you use x.264.

the streaming is not free

Only for commercial purposes. If it's not paid content, it's 100% free of charge by the MPEG-LA as far as streaming is concerned.

and the decoding is absolutely not free.

So all those open source projects like VLC, MPlayer, etc are paying through the nose to the MPEG-LA? That's news to me. And I may be wrong, but the reason Firefox would have to pay through the nose is because they like building everything into the browser (video decoding included) instead of just passing it to the OS, which means it would cost nothing if they were to do it like every other browser out there. I'm not entirely sure about that, but it's the impression I'm getting.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[amolapacificapaloma]

When he says "free", he means "free of patents threats". Of course you can do it "for free", but they will eventually come after you.

Ah, and when you "pass it to the OS", you need to have paid for and OS from a vendor that has paid the licensing...

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Anonymous Coward]

First thing to be noted is that any deal they offer today can be withdrawn in five years anyway.

Yes, I can remember that only last year people saying that everybody using H.264 would pay when the MPEG LA jacks up their fees in 2011. That didn't happen of course, which isn't a surprise since the MPEG LA historically always offered the same or better terms when a new licensing period began. Turns out they have something to lose by alienating their customers, especially since they also want to sell future products to them which isn't that easy if people mistrust you.

the encoding is not free

Encoding is free, encoders aren't if you distribute more than 100.000 a year.

the streaming is not free

It isn't free if the streams are pay per view or part of a payed subscription provided that there are more than 100.000 sales or subscribers per year. If you have to pay it's either 2 cent or 2% of the price per sale (whichever is lower) and at worst 10 cent per year per subscriber.

and the decoding is absolutely not free.

Again, decoding is free, distributing more than a certain number of decoders isn't.

The last one means any browser wishing to offer this functionality has to pay for it and unfortunatly it can't pass on the patent protection granted by paying for this so there is no way for firefox to offer this.

Any browser can offer H.264 decoding for free by using the system provided codec framework. While Mozilla has been decrying that approach for their desktop browser it's exactly what they do in their mobile version (Fennec). Every modern operating system comes with a H.264 decoder anyway. For older Windows and MacOS systems there are free licensed downloads (Divx, Quicktime) and for Linux systems there is at least a cheap gstreamer plugin (ignoring the fact that almost anyone who uses Linux as a desktop operating system probably has some version of FFMpeg installed anyway).
Of course this is a problem, but it's a far cry from there being no way to offer such functionality.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Anonymous Coward]

So all those open source projects like VLC, MPlayer, etc...

Are in in breach of patent law in the US at the very least.....

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Encoding is free,...

WRONG. If it was free they couldn't even suggest that i need a another license to put it on the internet or pay per view. I wouldn't an extra license for the *content* encoded when i use for commercial reasons. The *only* exemption is when its on a *free* website. Why do i need an exemption if its fee?

h.264 is not free in *any* sense of the word.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[daveime]

Yes, I can remember that only last year people saying that everybody using H.264 would pay when the MPEG LA jacks up their fees in 2011. That didn't happen of course, which isn't a surprise since it's not 2011 yet you muppet.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Anonymous Coward]

The licensing fees for the period from 2011 to 2015 where announced last January. They will be the same as the fees in the current licensing period. There was even an article here on slashdot about it.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[wvmarle]

it can't pass on the patent protection granted by paying for this so there is no way for firefox to offer this.

Here I have the feeling I'm still missing something. Why can FF not offer H.264 video? I understand it can not be built in (though they could make two versions of it, with native H.264 for jurisdictions outside software patent land). It's something that comes up all the time.

Not so long ago I have been playing YouTube videos in H.264 right in FF using mplayer-plugin. There is some greasemonkey script for that, youtube without flash. Maybe not as technically charming as native but for the end user what counts is: it works.

And before anyone starts riling about plugins: why are plugins bad while add-ons are good? From a user pov they're the same. Just a different name. Both add functionality to a browser that it doesn't do natively.

Also what I do not understand, is why FF is singled out for this. Chrome is also given away for free, just like Opera and IE. There is also an OS version of Chrome. I never hear about problems of paying for license fees for those browsers. Or any other browsers - which may be because the rest is too small to count.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Kjella]

Also what I do not understand, is why FF is singled out for this. Chrome is also given away for free, just like Opera and IE. There is also an OS version of Chrome. I never hear about problems of paying for license fees for those browsers.

"Chrome" is a closed source browser distributed by Google that contains a binary H.264 codec with a license valid for that binary only. "Chromium" is open source but comes with no H.264 codeo, though it's been patched to use the system codecs if available.

Firefox can not use the same solution as Chrome. It could use the same solution as Chromium, but it means it would only work for some people so they won't do it. That is why FF is singling themselves out, they are the only ones where it simply will not work.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[wvmarle]

Windows doesn't come with H.264 codecs installed out of the box? I know in Linux you always have to go through some clicks to get it installed (non-free codecs or so it's called) but besides that minor inconvenience it just works.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also what I do not understand, is why FF is singled out for this. Chrome is also given away for free, just like Opera and IE. There is also an OS version of Chrome. I never hear about problems of paying for license fees for those browsers

How is Firefox "singled out"? Google pays for the Chrome h.264 license, and Microsoft pays for IE -- neither Google nor Microsoft want their browser to be open source so the limitations (like the browsers being non-redistributable) are fine for them. Chromium and Opera do not support h.264 so it's no surprise you've not heard of license fee problems for them...

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[TheRaven64]

the encoding is not free

Unless you use x.264.

In which case, you still need a patent license from the MPEG-LA if you live in a country where any of their patents are valid.

So all those open source projects like VLC, MPlayer, etc are paying through the nose to the MPEG-LA?

Nope, they all use FFMPEG, which is based in France. France does not recognise software patents, so they are not required to pay anything. Using them in the USA without a patent license, however, is illegal.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[wzzzzrd]

If it's not paid content, it's 100% free of charge by the MPEG-LA as far as streaming is concerned.

Unless you have more than 100,000 users. Don't know if it's simultaneous users or just per month, but this clause is definitely there.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

say no to h264? Do you have a better codec? H264 is a damn good codec.

I think H264 will be around a long time, just like jpg and mpeg. Because they're good. The people behind these projects have changed the world for the better.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[node 3]

Why can FF not offer H.264 video?

They can. It's only their philosophy that prevents them from doing so. Neither the MPEG-LA, nor their own license, prevents them from supporting H.264. They could even distribute an H.264 plugin for Firefox on all supported platforms completely legally.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only free for streaming playback. When you transcode a DVD rip to .mp4 for your iCrap, if you're using something like handbrake you should be paying a fee and have a license from MPEG-LA. That's the problem!

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Ash-Fox]

Windows doesn't come with H.264 codecs installed out of the box?

Vista comes with H.263 to my knowledge. Seven comes with H.264.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Goaway]

No. The person distributing the software you use should have paid for a license. You are not making an encoder, and you are not distributing encoded content, so you need no license.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Goaway]

No, he got it right the first time. There is a license for distributing, not for encoding.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Ah, and when you "pass it to the OS", you need to have paid for and OS from a vendor that has paid the licensing...

So you can support it only on OSes which have already done so. I've got Windows 7, which has done so. OS X has also done so. If you've got a recent nVidia card, chances are you've got a fully legal and paid-for hardware decoder which can be used just fine under Linux.

In fact, passing it to the OS, or to whatever local codec subsystem you've got, is a great way to ensure you can take advantage of hardware decoders. Insisting on implementing all this in the browser as a childish political move is a great way to ensure that Firefox will be the last to take advantage of hardware-accelerated WebM, if that ever surfaces.

Passing it to the OS pretty much ends the legal bullshit, and is the right choice technologically, also. It seems pretty clear that the only reason Firefox refuses to do so is because they don't want h.264 to win, even if it doesn't affect Firefox itself directly.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[SanityInAnarchy]

almost anyone who uses Linux as a desktop operating system probably has some version of FFMpeg installed anyway

They probably also have an nVidia card, which offers hardware-accelerated h.264 decoding on Linux.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[SanityInAnarchy]

It could use the same solution as Chromium, but it means it would only work for some people so they won't do it.

Erm, WTF?

"Some people" is the vast, vast majority of the planet, and I'm not just talking about OS. And they're willing to do GPU-accelerated rendering, which also only works for "some people."

This is honestly the lamest excuse they've come up with so far.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he got it right the first time. There is a license for distributing, not for encoding.

Have you ever read the license terms of an HD camera. Here's whats in the manual for Pansonic's AJ-HPX2700, a $40,000 "professional" camera:

This product is licensed under the AVC Patent Portfolio License for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC Standard (“AVC Video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC Video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC Video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any use. Additional information may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC.
See http://www.mpegla-com

"personal and non-commercial use" - It's $40,000 camera, for crying out loud!

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Abcd1234]

It saddens me that it takes an AC to point all this out. The linked article is utter garbage, and does more to cloud the issue than the MPEG-LA's original announcement...

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[CherniyVolk]

Nope, they all use FFMPEG, which is based in France. France does not recognise software patents, so they are not required to pay anything. Using them in the USA without a patent license, however, is illegal.

Wow, learn something new everyday.

France doesn't recognize software patents? Man, I almost feel bad disliking the French for so long. I only wonder how much worse it might get in America before I decide to look into immigrating to France.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[TheRaven64]

France doesn't recognize software patents?

A lot of the world doesn't recognise software patents, including most of the EU. You might be able to start hating them soon. Sarkozy is keen on introducing software patents, although the FFII has been quite successful in opposing this.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[LWATCDR]

They choose not to.
They could just use the OS codec support which I feel is the correct way to go. That way if a new codec comes out or if a better hardware accelerated version is created you program uses it.
FF doesn't want to support h.264 because they feel it is wrong to support it.
Frankly I fear that will be the death of FF. When it doesn't work people will go to Chrome, Opera, Safari, or even stay with IE.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[cHiphead]

I bought the computer, I bought the software, I bought the camera, why the fuck should I have to pay to distribute videos made with said equipment?

(Note, I know 'why', but ITS FUCKING CRAZY.)

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Burpmaster]

Firefox is all about open standards. If Firefox implements H.264, then what's next? ActiveX? We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[gorzek]

The point is that Firefox doesn't need to implement any codec whatsoever. Just pass video decoding to the OS, and worry about whether the OS supports the codec in question, be it in hardware or software.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Goaway]

Have you ever read the license terms of an HD camera

No, and neither have you, you have just read what somebody on the internet claims it means.

That license agreement is there to cover the manufacturer's ass. They have paid their license to produce a device that encodes and decodes h.264. However, they have not paid for a license for you to distribute that content. They couldn't, because the cost of that license depends on how much you distribute. Non-commercial distribution is free, which is why they put that in the license agreement.

You do not need a license to encode on a licensed encoder, commercial or not. You do need one to distribute. If you are a filmmaker, you likely pay this license when you have discs pressed. This is nothing new, it's been this way for a long time. MPEG-2 on DVDs is the exact same.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Goaway]

While I'd be much happier if things didn't work this way, it's not entirely crazy. Parents exist to protect inventions, and the utility of the invention of h.264 is not solely contained in the encoding stage. The actual utility of the invention is that you can transmit video using very little bandwidth, so it makes sense that the patent should apply to the act of transmitting the content.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[yeshuawatso]

...Parents exist to protect inventions ...

Huh, all this time I thought my job as a parent was to protect, provide, and nurture my kids. Now I have to protect inventions too?

Damn, I knew there was a catch.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[grcumb]

Why can FF not offer H.264 video?

They can. It's only their philosophy that prevents them from doing so.

Bullshit. The MPEG-LA's patent restrictions explicitly disallow redistribution by unlicensed third parties. The license under which Mozilla has been released explicitly allows redistribution by third parties.

That's kind of the point of Free Software.

Saying that 'it's only their philosophy' that prevents them from licensing H.264 is disingenuous at best, mendacious at worst. It's like saying it's only philosophy that prevents the US from moving to a Communist-style command economy; it's only philosophy that stops the Catholic church from performing abortions.

Yes, it's only philosophy that prevents Firefox from becoming its own antithesis and from eschewing the very operating principles that made it the success it is today.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[shutdown -p now]

Bullshit. The MPEG-LA's patent restrictions explicitly disallow redistribution by unlicensed third parties.

Can you point out what, exactly, is being redistributed when a browser uses the OS codec for H.264, if one is available?

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Burpmaster]

And why not also embed the IE engine for compatibility with IE-only sites? We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS. You didn't address this point. If Firefox can't support H.264 on all operating systems, then it shouldn't support it on any.

We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS. We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS. We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Burpmaster]

And why not also embed the IE engine for compatibility with IE-only sites? We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS. You didn't address this point. If Firefox can't support H.264 on all operating systems, then it shouldn't support it on any.

We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS. We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS. We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[SanityInAnarchy]

If Firefox implements H.264, then what's next? ActiveX?

You've gotta be joking. ActiveX isn't cross-platform.

Guess what is?

That's right, the netscape plugin API, which Firefox still supports, which enables them to run Flash, which is far worse than any codec which could conceivably be used for HTML5 video.

We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS.

The "correct" OS being Windows or OS X, or if you've got an nVidia card, Linux, Solaris, or FreeBSD, or Apple's iOS, or Android, or...

You're kind of losing the high ground if your complaint is really that you can't legally play HTML5 video on AmigaOS or BeOS.

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[SanityInAnarchy]

And why not also embed the IE engine for compatibility with IE-only sites?

Aside from the fact that this has happened and it wasn't the end of the world, there simply isn't an analogy here. There isn't a native HTML renderer API you can call out to on every platform, or a reason to do so.

However, on pretty much every platform Firefox supports, there is a native video API, and that native video API most likely supports h.264, not that it's any of Firefox's fucking business what codecs it supports. For all Firefox knows, I could have a Linux-only hardware-accelerated theora card -- why should Firefox get in the way by insisting it's all software-based, so Firefox can keep a stranglehold of control on it?

I've got h.264 in hardware and in two OSes on the same machine. I've also got Firefox on the same machine. And it's only fucking zealots like you that keep me from connecting the two together.

If Firefox can't support GPU rendering on all operating systems, then it shouldn't support it on any.

Fixed that for you. Does it still make sense?

If so, why does Firefox currently support GPU rendering? It doesn't work on all OSes -- not all OSes have drivers for modern enough GPUs to make this work.

If not, what is your argument?

We don't need to regress back to the days where websites only work if you have the "correct" OS.

Yeah, just keep repeating that as if it's an argument. I mostly agree with you, but I find your methods disgusting. You would restrict my freedom to ensure I have freedom. Do you realize how pathological that is?

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Burpmaster]

And why not also embed the IE engine for compatibility with IE-only sites?

Aside from the fact that this has happened

No, it didn't happen. I'm already aware of that addon, but it changes nothing. Firefox does not embed IE by default. The user has to install a third-party addon to embed IE, and hardly anyone does that. A website must (shock and horror!) code to open standards to support Firefox. They can't half-ass it by flipping on the IE-mode and screw over people that didn't pay a toll to a "rights holder" that didn't do any work to create the website in the first place.

and it wasn't the end of the world, there simply isn't an analogy here. There isn't a native HTML renderer API you can call out to on every platform, or a reason to do so.

No, it's a perfect analogy. There isn't a native and licensed H.264 renderer you can call out to on every platform, either. There is a reason to do so for both HTML and H.264, and it's the same bad reason in both cases: to support viewing of content that isn't in an open format or coded to open standards.

The reason that's bad is that it encourages the problem it's meant to deal with and does an incomplete job of dealing with it at that. That's a net negative.

However, on pretty much every platform Firefox supports, there is a native video API, and that native video API most likely supports h.264,

That's just a statement about today. Look at the qualifiers I italicized. They will change in the future. If Linux adoption grows, the "rely on the OS" approach will cover fewer people. By encouraging the widespread use of H.264 now, we'd just be handing over free leverage to the patent cartel that is MPEG LA, and they will use it against us later to get as much out of us as they think they can get away with.

not that it's any of Firefox's fucking business what codecs it supports.

Actually, it is, because security is Firefox's business. Giving untrusted websites free reign to load dozens of unknown external libraries and feed unchecked data to them is a very bad idea.

For all Firefox knows, I could have a Linux-only hardware-accelerated theora card -- why should Firefox get in the way by insisting it's all software-based, so Firefox can keep a stranglehold of control on it?

Firefox shouldn't get in the way and it wouldn't get in the way. Hardware accelerated decoding is a good thing. But it should actually be hardware accelerated decoding, not hardware enabled decoding. I don't want a dongle to be required for a fully functioning browser.

I've got h.264 in hardware and in two OSes on the same machine. I've also got Firefox on the same machine. And it's only fucking zealots like you that keep me from connecting the two together.

Nobody is stopping you. You even have access to the source code to make it happen. They're just not doing the job themselves, because it's a really bad idea to have that in the standard Firefox.

If Firefox can't support GPU rendering on all operating systems, then it shouldn't support it on any.

Fixed that for you. Does it still make sense?

If so, why does Firefox currently support GPU rendering? It doesn't work on all OSes -- not all OSes have drivers for modern enough GPUs to make this work.

If not, what is your argument?

No, that version doesn't make sense. Firefox supports software rendering as a fallback when GPU rendering isn't available, and both rendering methods do the same thing. Your DOM gets rasterized whether you have GPU acceleration or not.

What I'm against is licensing tech from monopolies under restrictive terms where it can't be made available to everyone,

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Firefox does not embed IE by default. The user has to install a third-party addon to embed IE, and hardly anyone does that.

Yet you seem to be against even allowing a common API for third parties to add on codecs.

There isn't a native and licensed H.264 renderer you can call out to on every platform, either.

IE's renderer exists on exactly one platform. H.264 exists on nearly every platform, and by "exists", I mean "already installed, or available at zero cost." Refusing to support native codecs is like refusing to support WebGL because the best GL implementations happen to be composed of both proprietary hardware and software.

to support viewing of content that isn't in an open format or coded to open standards.

Or to make it up to the user whether or not to support that. Or to use existing hardware renderers on a given platform. Or, yes, to support viewing of content that isn't in an open format or coded to open standards, but is significantly more open and useful than the same content in a less open format (Flash).

That's just a statement about today. Look at the qualifiers I italicized. They will change in the future.

How so?

If Linux adoption grows, the "rely on the OS" approach will cover fewer people.

So nVidia cards would become less popular among Linux users? Or is it that you don't think Linux will grow by vendor support, like Dell's Ubuntu, which includes codecs?

By encouraging the widespread use of H.264 now, we'd just be handing over free leverage to the patent cartel that is MPEG LA, and they will use it...

...for how long? Patents expire.

And just what is this nightmare scenario you're envisioning? It looks to me like they already have control. It looks to me like they have more control than they ever dreamed -- they can dictate which player you use (Flash, Silverlight, etc), because there isn't a common browser-based standard for people to use.

Actually, it is, because security is Firefox's business. Giving untrusted websites free reign to load dozens of unknown external libraries and feed unchecked data to them is a very bad idea.

Out of curiosity, do you roll your own IP stack, too?

Giving untrusted websites free reign to feed data to libraries provided by the OS seems like an inevitability, and a far safer prospect than providing a model in which any local program can install plugins or extensions which load into the browser process and arbitrarily muck with any arbitrary page.

Firefox shouldn't get in the way and it wouldn't get in the way. Hardware accelerated decoding is a good thing. But it should actually be hardware accelerated decoding, not hardware enabled decoding.

In other words, Firefox shouldn't support WebGL unless it ships MesaGL? Really?

I don't want a dongle to be required for a fully functioning browser.

Even one you already have? How many devices do you have which don't already have a decoder of some sort?

Nobody is stopping you. You even have access to the source code to make it happen.

The source code isn't all I'd require -- Mozilla owns the Firefox trademark, so whatever I created, the result wouldn't be Firefox. I may as well stick to Chromium.

It is MPEG LA that's trying to take away your right to use H.264 so they can sell it back to you.

Except they haven't. Right now, they have given me the right to use it -- at no cost, and with significant improvements over all other codecs, including but not limited to native hardware support.

And I do -- in Flash and in Chrome. But because of Mozilla's choices, I can't in Firefox.

In other words, you are taking away my ability to do something because the MPEG LA might take

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[Burpmaster]

Firefox does not embed IE by default. The user has to install a third-party addon to embed IE, and hardly anyone does that.

Yet you seem to be against even allowing a common API for third parties to add on codecs.

I never said that. Also, I have no idea how this is a reply to what you quoted.

IE's renderer exists on exactly one platform.

So? It's a platform with enough market share that a person could say the solution works for nearly everyone and is therefore acceptable. I just threw your own argument back at you, and you respond with special pleading.

Refusing to support native codecs is like refusing to support WebGL because the best GL implementations happen to be composed of both proprietary hardware and software.

No it isn't. The reasons I gave for not supporting native codecs simply do not apply to WebGL.

Or to make it up to the user whether or not to support that.

It already is up to the user. You're free to install any third-party modifications you want.

That's just a statement about today. Look at the qualifiers I italicized. They will change in the future.

How so?

It should be obvious what I was saying. In the future the statement could become "on some platforms Firefox supports, there is a native video API, and that native video API occasionally supports h.264"

If Linux adoption grows, the "rely on the OS" approach will cover fewer people.

So nVidia cards would become less popular among Linux users?

Yeah, probably. That's actually pretty likely. In any case, a wise decision maker does not assume that they can reliably predict the future.

Or is it that you don't think Linux will grow by vendor support, like Dell's Ubuntu, which includes codecs?

Not all vendors are necessarily going to bundle licensed codecs.

By encouraging the widespread use of H.264 now, we'd just be handing over free leverage to the patent cartel that is MPEG LA, and they will use it...

...for how long? Patents expire.

For 20 years, minimum. Or never. It keeps getting extended because they're always adding newly filed patents that they claim are essential for decoding H.264. Their list of patents for H.264 was last revised a few weeks ago. None of their lists are older than July 1st of this year. Just about two months ago. Even MPEG2, first available in 1996, is having new patents added to the pool. So the MPEG2 pool so far has a total lifespan of 34 years, and counting. And H.264 is likely to have a longer lifespan than MPEG2.

It looks to me like they already have control.

Not over Firefox. And without Firefox, they can't monopolize HTML5 video.

Out of curiosity, do you roll your own IP stack, too?

No, and that can't be done by Firefox, and it's not needed. The IP stack is already a hardened subsystem designed to handle untrusted data. Also, you're invoking the all-or-nothing fallacy.

Giving untrusted websites free reign to feed data to libraries provided by the OS

These aren't all libraries provided by the OS. You advocated loading up any arbitrary codec that happens to be on the system. And it would be a security risk regardless. A default Firefox won't pass ANY untrusted data ANY external libraries, OS-provided or otherwise. This is a security feature. It also won't launch programs to view files without prompting first. It even has countermeasures against sites tricking a user into opening a file, such as by trying to get

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I never said that. Also, I have no idea how this is a reply to what you quoted.

It would be hypocritical if you did, but I apologize. I don't mean to strawman, but this does seem to be the direction Mozilla is heading -- if they were to use the native video APIs, it'd be entirely up to the user which codecs are supported. If the native APIs aren't rich enough, how hard would it be to expose a rich enough API for others to hook into?

So? It's a platform with enough market share that a person could say the solution works for nearly everyone and is therefore acceptable. I just threw your own argument back at you, and you respond with special pleading [wikipedia.org].

Actually, no, it was an argument of degree -- it's a very different "nearly everyone" which only includes two OSes from a "nearly everyone" which only excludes (mabye) things like Haiku, and not necessarily.

I'm also not sure the "right OS" argument is ultimately valid, considering I don't think anyone has ever objected to people writing their own third-party drivers -- so if you've already got a decoder in hardware, why should it matter what OS you have? If you don't have a driver, that's a bit like decrying Ethernet because your OS doesn't support your network card.

No it isn't. The reasons I gave for not supporting native codecs simply do not apply to WebGL.

The security reasons absolutely do. Let me quote them:

Giving untrusted websites free reign to load dozens of unknown external libraries and feed unchecked data to them is a very bad idea.

I suppose it's different, but what is the important difference? Dozens of libraries, but I'll be the nVidia driver has more code than all of them put together. Unknown, certainly -- you have no idea what OpenGL renderer will be used, could be one backed by DirectX, could be ATI/AMD, nVidia, Intel, any software renderer, any intermediate layer, etc, etc.

Unchecked data, absolutely.

And this is the only way to implement it -- you cannot reasonably embed an OpenGL implementation; for many websites which will be implementing this, a hardware accelerator of some sort will be required. So this:

Hardware accelerated decoding is a good thing. But it should actually be hardware accelerated decoding, not hardware enabled decoding.

...effectively becomes a distinction without a difference in the case of WebGL.

I suppose I will have to concede that it would be a good thing if pages were viewable -- though as a slideshow rather than video -- on any device, anywhere, which chooses to implement it.

"on some platforms Firefox supports, there is a native video API, and that native video API occasionally supports h.264"

I don't see it. In particular, how would the "nearly every" become "some"? Do you see many platforms abandoning their video APIs in the near future? Or do you see a viable new video platform which would not expose such an API?

I don't see the second part changing soon, either. nVidia has a large investment in Linux, for one. I can find articles from 2008 talking about ATI's H.264 support on Linux, and ATI is also committed to solid open-source drivers -- meaning they should be portable to other GPL'd OSes -- though I don't know for a fact whether the open source drivers support it. ATI has also used open specs, suggesting it should be possible to write a clean-room implementation.

Yeah, probably. That's actually pretty likely.

Other than a shift towards ATI, which supports the same thing, what makes you say that?

In any case, a wise decision maker does not assume that they can reliably predict the future.

Yet it is exactly concerns about the future which bring this up in the first place. I'm curious what possible outcomes would vindicate Firefox here. It doesn't seem

Re:It's not "Free" to begin with.

[anguirus.x]

It's almost like they have a whit of common sense. I'm not surprised this is the case. One of the major schools of thought which developed the wavelet theory underlying MPEG and JPEG was based in France. Ingrid Daubechies, Stephane Mallat, and Yves Meyer were pioneers in this field. In the Preface to the 2nd Edition of Mallat's "A Wavelet Tour Of Signal Processing" he states very clearly that the ideas they were 'discovering' were not new ideas at all. He noted the prior art in the field, and then set to work presenting the new formalism which brought all these once disconnected ideas together into a single framework. With h.264, WebM, or any of the next-gen standards they're moving on to a multigrid formalism and include predictive filters to increase compression and efficiency. Because the basic idea behind these new codecs is pretty simple and is taught to tens of thousands of scientists who may not even be interested in streaming video, it's ridiculous to claim that any next-gen codec is deserving of a patent. It's funny. I might use an algorithm resembling WebM to solve the electronic structure of a small molecule, and yet these douches patenting codecs think they've really invented something?

Patented Standards

[GuerillaRadio]

It seems an obvious requirement now to me that any 'international standards', as H.264 is described in TFA, should not be written by a consortium that have a collection of patents on the only possible implementation of the standard!

I'm not sure how this would be ensured - maybe the same consortium that pool the defensive patent pool for Linux could start a standards body based around this simple idea.

Re:Patented Standards

[ducomputergeek]

ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264. You have a bunch of companies that decide to share patents into one resource. It makes it easy for other companies to pay 1 fee and then use the technology. And H.264's licensing terms are reasonable. There is a cost of doing business. I know that is not popular around here, but it's the truth.

Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing. And I see more of these types of industry barriers to entry popping up.

Re:Patented Standards

[GuerillaRadio]

Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing. And I see more of these types of industry barriers to entry popping up.

It won't be harder, it will be impossible - it destroys the mechanism of Free / Open Source software. The way you put it is as if the rise of FOSS is just some kind of unfortunate minority part of the computing world that will be affected, rather than one of the most important, game changing event in the recent history of computing.

Re:Patented Standards

[WWWWolf]

ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264.

Don't know how W-CDMA works, but are ARM's fans flocking together and trying to push ARM as the One True Instruction Set for Every Microprocessor-Powered Thing Ever? Nay, demanding that all other instruction sets are technically inferior, and we should stick to a reasonable, up-to-date standard like ARM? Are they demanding that the ARM architecture should be deemed part of the open, interoperable, free-to-use sphere of commonly used computer technology (without really mentioning the patent costs at any part)?

The point is this: No one cares how H.264 licensing works, unless they're interested in creating H.264 videos. Everyone's concerned because if H.264 becomes the part of HTML5, then everyone has to care how H.264 licensing works, whether they actually want to give a damn about H.264 or not. It becomes a part of the baggage you bring with implementing HTML5 support.

Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing.

But that's a legal requirement, not a licensing requirement. No one's forcing you to use H.264 from legal perspective.

Re:Patented Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264. You have a bunch of companies that decide to share patents into one resource. It makes it easy for other companies to pay 1 fee and then use the technology.

Yes, that's how it works.

And H.264's licensing terms are reasonable

But here I disagree. The difference between H264 and the above is its application space: both ARM and CDMA have a license covering production of equipment, whereas H264 is offered as a user license. The situation would be comparable if an end-user were charged for every communication over W-CDMA, or every programmer was billed for generating ARM machine-code (using a licensed compiler etc).

As it stands, end users are still liable for royalties concerning the codec in addition to the patent fees they may have already paid for by purchasing a digital camera / BR player. That's why the MPEG licensing terms are considered non-free.

Re:Patented Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, let me see: there is a breed of software that would enable anyone to save a lot of money, and whose very existence is used as an argument ("anyone can afford it") for ever growing "e-"-isation of all human activities, but a cartel of big companies are pushing their own way, that prevents this savings from happening, into the laws ("standards"). Seems mighty similar to imposed and unfair taxation by non-governmental entities. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Patented Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Saving money = taxation? You're dreamin'

Re:Patented Standards

[sonamchauhan]

Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing.
     

But that's a legal requirement, not a licensing requirement. No one's forcing you to use H.264 from legal perspective.

How did the credit card industry get the government to pass a law for this? Its almost certainly a licensing or trademark requirement.

Re:Patented Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing. And I see more of these types of industry barriers to entry popping up.

You can certainly write it, but it will take a commercial enterprise to support it and pay the fees.

Red Hat develops lots of FOSS, and they charge for their product. They also paid to get RHEL certified via Common Criteria to a particular EAL for use in government circles. Similarly OpenSSL's FIPS certification was paid for by 'corporate sponsors'.

Re:Patented Standards

[mcgrew]

I found a link from TFA to be quite interesting:

Where does WebM fit in?
WebM combines the Ogg Vorbis audio codec with the VP8 video codec Google obtained through its February 2010 acquisition of On2 Technologies for $133.9 million. On2 has a long history in codecs: Its earlier VP3 technology formed the foundation of Ogg Theora, and its VP6 was widely used in video streaming on the Web by virtue of its inclusion in Adobe Systems' Flash Player. VP8 had only been under development until this week, but now Google has issued the specification for the technology, source code and a software developer kit to let programmers use it, and a collection of partners who endorsed it in varying degrees. In contrast to how On2 handled its codecs and to how an industry group called MPEG LA licenses patents for using H.264, Google released WebM as a royalty-free technology. That means among other things that nobody will have to pay for using it and that open-source software projects can incorporate it directly.

Hooray! Free codecs for everyone! Who could possibly be unhappy about this?
The 26 companies and organizations that have contributed to the pool of H.264 patents. Among them: Microsoft, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Philips Electronics, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba. Apple holds a single patent in the pool, too. It's not cheap to research video technology, and it's not cheap to license it, either. For example, even though Microsoft holds 73 patents in the H.264 pool, the company pays twice as much for its rights to ship H.264 support in Windows 7 as it receives back from MPEG LA for its share of the rights.

What's MPEG LA doing about it?
At a minimum, it's raising doubts about whether VP8 infringes video patents, and maybe more. Group spokesman Tom O'Reilly won't comment about whether VP8 infringes any H.264 patents, but he did say Thursday that MPEG LA is considering a new patent pool that would license any patents used in VP8 technology: "Although we assume virtually all codecs are based on patented technology, the AVC/H.264 License we offer is limited to providing coverage for the use of AVC/H.264." Added MPEG LA Chief Executive Larry Horn, "Google has the right to disclaim royalties for its own technologies, if any, but it doesn't have the right to disclaim them without appropriate permissions for technologies owned by others, or otherwise contribute to the infringement of those technologies

Why use H.264 when Google is giving us WebM for free?

Re:Patented Standards

[dave420]

HTML5 has no codecs in it. There is a discussion to try to get the support of one codec in HTML5, but it can't be patent-encumbered, so h.264 is out of the question. Please stop making things up.

Re:Patented Standards

[yyxx]

It seems an obvious requirement now to me that any 'international standards',

"Standards" aren't a legal concepts, they are just what people agree on. So, there is no way of enforcing any such requirements. And why do you think h.264 has those patents in the first place? Most of what they patent is nearly useless from a compression point of view. The whole purpose of the MPEG-LA consortium is to create a proprietary standard covered by enough patents that there cannot be any patent unencumbered implementations. And since MPEG-LA members make the hardware and software that most people use, they can impose such standards on you, whether it's good for you or not, and whether you realize what's going on or not.

Re:Patented Standards

[h4rr4r]

That is the point of these things. They want to keep the little players out, that includes FREE software.

Re:Patented Standards

[Qubit]

But that [PA-DSS...] is a legal requirement, not a licensing requirement.

Actually, according to the Wikipedia page (see the link in my comment below), it appears that PA-DSS is just an industry standard, not one bearing any requirements under current law.

The article does point out that the Legislature (Big "L") is/was considering putting into effect laws to regulate such systems, and it's highly likely that such legislation would build from current industry practices, but AFAIK there's actually nothing outside de-facto standardization at the moment.

Turning to H.264...

No one's forcing you to use H.264 from legal perspective.

Actually, I think that they might be. Here's a video from the President. It's available as

• Video, MP4 container (likely with a creamy H.264 center)
• Audio, MP3
• Transcript, HTML

Were it not for the transcript, you'd have to use a patented codec to consume that content. Even as it is, if you want more than a boring, flat, text file, you need to interact with MP3 or H.264 codecs.

It appears that everything on the Whitehouse video site is in MP4/H.264 formats. The basic message is: Pay up for the codecs or you don't get to enjoy that content from the President.

Yeah...

[webheaded]

I'm still rooting for Google's format. I don't care about free as in money so much as free as in open source. I don't see how it could possibly be sustainable for every single company that makes a browser from here on out to have to pay a fee to use this codec. If they put H.264 into the HTML 5 spec, that is only going to make it a pain in the ass for browser developers and open source users. It's stupid. This isn't helpful...it's just slight of hand. "Look it's free!" Um no...it actually isn't free at all. I wish people writing all the other articles would acknowledge that a little better. This changes nothing.

Re:Yeah...

[beelsebob]

I don't care about free as in money so much as free as in open source.

Then you should be quite happy with h264 – the biggest encoder (x264) is open source, and there are plenty of open source decoder libraries for it.

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how it could possibly be sustainable for every single company that makes a browser from here on out to have to pay a fee to use this codec.

They don't have to, nor should it have anything to do with the BROWSER. Mozilla has successfully distracted most everyone from the issue: the browser shouldn't care one bit about what media files it's presenting, because it should rely on the system frameworks for that content. If you're on Windows or OS X, it's a non-issue. If you're on Linux, there are plenty of legal ways to install an h.264 codec.

If you have a philosophical objection to its usage, you can simply choose not to view that content.

If they put H.264 into the HTML 5 spec, that is only going to make it a pain in the ass for browser developers and open source users.

What makes it a pain in the ass is that the browsers are involved in the implementation at all. Why does Firefox support non-free image and audio formats? Why are they drawing an artificial line in the sand around a video format? They allow Flash, which is proprietary and uses h.264; they allow Windows Media and Quicktime plugins.

The only thing making it a pain in the ass is Mozilla.

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're on Windows or OS X, it's a non-issue.

Yeah, sort of. Keeping the "minimum price" of an operating system artificially high by means like patent licenses is exactly what Microsoft and Apple want... at that point their margin doesn't seem as large. This is what the battle is about in the end: how to prevent basic computing from becoming (even more of) a commodity item.

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does Firefox support non-free image and audio formats?

which ones does it support?

They allow Flash, which is proprietary and uses h.264; they allow Windows Media and Quicktime plugins.

They don't ship with Flash. they support it as an external plugin. They don't ship h.264. They support it as an external plugin

Re:Yeah...

[AVryhof]

Mozilla should just use the libavcodec installed on the system and be done with it....that way, you have the free version distributed with Ubuntu (the one with the restricted modules disabled -- that should also come with Mozilla on all platforms) and you can simply enable restricted extras or install anything that includes the restricted libavcodec modules to make the rest work.

It would provide the consistent user experience they are looking for, as well as the ability to play a whole host of audio/video formats that it doesn't yet play.

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash & Windows Media are *plugins* in Firefox. Not native implementations.

Try Again.

Trouble with h.264 is.... if it becomes a part of html5........ browsers will be expected to have *native* implementation of it.

Thats something mozilla can't do, because of patents that LA won't allow sub-licensing of.

H.264 is incompatible with open source. Doesn't mean we can't have a Firefox plugin for it, mush like flash (hopefully having a better quality than flash :) ).

Re:Yeah...

[hedwards]

Bullshit, citation necessary, what formats are you referring to? A browser can't do much without support for JPEG and GIF. Flash is a plug in as are Windows Media and Quicktime. You don't have to install the plug ins if you don't want to. Which coincidentally is how Mozilla is handling the problem of H.264 as well, if you get the plug in you can play it. They just can't include anything that's going to obligate them to pay a licensing free.

Re:Yeah...

[westlake]

I'm still rooting for Google's format.

H.264 evolved outside the web.

How the geek expects Google to stop this sort of thing from happening is beyond me.

Google and On2 are not a licensor of any of the patents in MPEG LA's patent pools.

The licensors are the global giants in R&D and manufacturing - companies like Mitsubishi, Philips, Sony and Samsung - and they have had the better part of ten years to commercialize H.264.

WebM in its current state is a low-bandwidth distribution codec for YouTube, not a production codec. Not even for the Flip pocket camcorder.

That is not going to change anytime soon - if ever.

   

Re:Yeah...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Flash is a plug in as are Windows Media and Quicktime. You don't have to install the plug ins if you don't want to. Which coincidentally is how Mozilla is handling the problem of H.264 as well, if you get the plug in you can play it.

BZZZT!

Nope, in fact, that's the point, that's what I've been saying for months now -- things would be much simpler if Firefox allowed this kind of thing to be based on plugins, even better if they simply delegated to the system's native media framework. They don't, they refuse to -- I know of no way to play H.264 in an HTML5 video tag in Firefox.

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

How the geek expects Google to stop this sort of thing from happening is beyond me.

You used "geek" in a derogatory way, we're all geeks here, if you don't consider yourself one then get the fuck out.

Re:Yeah...

[dave420]

There is no talk of making any codec mandatory for HTML5 video. None. HTML5 video specifically relies on the underlying browser (or OS) to provide decoding. Just as you can put whatever kind of image you want in an img tag and rely on the browser to render it (if it can). Most browsers (ie not Firefox) pass on video decoding to the operating system. As most users have OS X or Windows, for which free, licensed h.264 decoders are readily available, or Linux with a GPU that has a hardware (also licensed) h.264 decoder, most users don't have to worry about all this licensing malarkey. I'd root for Google's standard if it didn't suck balls so much and have practically no hardware support.

Re:Yeah...

[dave420]

You do realise that it would cost anyone selling more than 5,000,000 copies of their OS a year just $0.10 per copy, with a cap at $5m? That's nothing. And if you sell between 100,000 and 5,000,000 copies, it's $0.20 per unit. And if you don't even manage that, if you sell 100,000 or fewer a year, it's free.

Re:Yeah...

[PybusJ]

Not really.

Unless you have an encoder license covering x264 then MPEG-LA still claim you are violating their patents if you use x264 to encode. MPEG-LA don't give out encoder licenses to end users (not even if you offer to pay them), but only to encoder suppliers. Even though I have a licensed H.264 decoder supplied with my OS, it is only licensed to play content created with a licensed encoder. I don't have, and can't obtain, a license to play x264 encoded video. So the MPEG-LA still claim I am violating their patents if I play something you encoded. Both of us _could_ get sued.

People who want "free as in open source", are not usually interested in free as in I can download some code but don't have patent licenses for it. This announcement has done nothing, nothing at all, to obviate the need to encoder and decoder licenses, this was only about streaming licenses -- yet another license you needed on top of encoder licenses and decoder licenses.

So x264 is maybe useful for "encoder manufacturers"; they can use its code in their products, if they can find a way to do so under the terms of the GPL[0]. Google use x264 based tools to encode youtube videos, and they have registered themselves as an encoder supplier to get the patent license (even though they only supply themselves). Since they don't distribute the encoder they create, they don't have to comply with the patent clauses in the GPL. Google are about the only people to legally benefit from x264, the rest of us don't have the size/funds for that option.

You can take the view that you don't care about infringing patents and ignore the MPEG-LA (fine, but in which case this announcement doesn't matter to you), or you do care (in which case this announcement still doesn't allow you to use open source H.264 codecs). There is *nothing* in this announcement for Open Source video users.

[0] The GPL, which x264 claims it is licensed under says: "if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Put an object tag inside your video tag as fallback, as has worked for the past fifteen years or so.

Really, I don't understand this argument. "Why don't the browsers just use the system's video support?" How about this: why don't *websites* just use the system's video support? YouTube could already play its h.264 source videos just fine on my system without using Flash, but this has never been an option without using a greasemonkey hack -- even though I don't have the Flash plugin installed.

Even besides that, the HTML5 video tag has a lot of properties and JavaScript behavior that needs to be guaranteed to work, or we won't have gotten anything better than just using an object tag. I don't think most platform video libraries expose the sort of low-level stuff that the spec demands.

Re:Yeah...

[Qubit]

There is no talk of making any codec mandatory for HTML5 video. None.

Well, there were Ogg formats in the draft HTML5 spec. But then they were pulled out because Nokia and Apple got all tantrum-y about the whole thing. Really.

Having a default video codec would mean that people could just assume that there's Ogg Theora playback... or that there's Ogg Vorbis playback. Actually, as much contention as there was about Ogg Theora, I don't understand why people couldn't just compromise on getting Ogg Vorbis stuck in there. Even implemented in software, the iPhone and other handheld hardware could decode files very easily, and at least we'd finally be on our way towards sticking a fork in MP3.

HTML5 video specifically relies on the underlying browser (or OS) to provide decoding.

By definition, yes (unless you're relying on in-the-cloud decoding or magical pixies or something...), but I digress.

Just as you can put whatever kind of image you want in an img tag and rely on the browser to render it (if it can)...

Many browsers can't handle TIFF files, or BMP files, and last I checked IE had problems with PNGs and mostly barfed on SVG...

Most browsers (ie not Firefox) pass on video decoding to the operating system.

Many browsers may do so, but Firefox still has ~ 31% of the marketshare, about twice as much as Chrome, Safari, and Opera combined (source: wikipedia).

So what I'm saying is: Don't write off Fox... or the big red dinosaur (take your pick).

As most users have OS X or Windows, for which free, licensed h.264 decoders are readily available

That's free as in 'freeware', not Free as in Freedom.

or Linux with a GPU that has a hardware (also licensed) h.264 decoder

I actually don't know the numbers on this one and I'm curious about it. What percentage of hardware shipped today (desktops, servers, handhelds, etc...) has a fully-licensed (by the MPEG-LA) hardware decoder for H.264 in it?

And I'm no lawyer, but I wouldn't put it past the MPEG-LA to sue someone for using an H.264 software decoder, even if the hardware they were running it on had a fully-licensed hardware decoder in it.

most users don't have to worry about all this licensing malarkey.

I really wish that this were true, but I'm afraid that it's not the case. Just think for a second -- the H.264 hardware is only licensed for decoding not encoding. So if you want to upload a video from your DV-cam to your website or put it in your presentation, you'll need a license to go along with whatever software you use (or you'll need to pay a fee for software that includes such a license).

I'd root for Google's standard if it didn't suck balls so much and have practically no hardware support.

I'm no codec hacker, but I thought the whole point about all of this so-called "hardware" support was that it wasn't actually baked into silicon, but was low-level code that could be loaded onto DSPs. AFAIK google has 14 vendors working on hardware support, so it's just going to take a little time for that to make it to market.

And yes, it sounds like the VP8 codec needs ongoing help to get it whipped into shape. But given that people like a few FFMpeg developers have written much faster decoders than the reference one, it sounds like that work is well underway.

Re:Yeah...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Really, I don't understand this argument. "Why don't the browsers just use the system's video support?" How about this: why don't *websites* just use the system's video support?

If by that you mean the object tag, well, consider what you can do with a video that you can't necessarily do with an object. Compositing, pause/play or otherwise control, point it at a Base64 data URL, etc, etc. You acknowledged this:

the HTML5 video tag has a lot of properties and JavaScript behavior that needs to be guaranteed to work, or we won't have gotten anything better than just using an object tag.

Which would be exactly the point of using the native video framework, yet inside a video tag.

YouTube could already play its h.264 source videos just fine on my system without using Flash, but this has never been an option without using a greasemonkey hack

Because YouTube wants to be able to do things like stick an ad in front of the video, then start the video once the ad finishes, or float an ad, or annotations, etc on top of the video, or deep-link to a specific timecode.

So what, exactly, is the problem with the platform APIs?

I don't think most platform video libraries expose the sort of low-level stuff that the spec demands.

Citation needed, especially as Safari already uses QuickTime, or whatever they've got on the iPad, to do just this.

Let's patent the universe!

[Anonymous Coward]

Though this is still speculative, it wouldn't be surprising, as, like patents, lawsuits bring in the $$$.
Gah, software patents once again stifling innovation.

I'm pragmatic

[93 Escort Wagon]

I don't care as much about the codecs being open source or closed source - I'm mainly interested in which format offers the higher quality at the same (or lower) bitrate.

As far as why MPEG LA did this now - probably because right now they've got the upper hand, and they want to be sure not to give their competitors ammunition.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pragmatic. That's why I always choose formats that offer me much greater liberty of usage. Imagine if the Internet was built of out closed formats and closed protocols. It would be an unworkable farce. No, it's no contest. Open formats trump closed formats every time.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Fumus]

You may be only interested in quality, but read the comments above. H.264 is 'free' in that the end user doesn't have to pay. Encoding, decoding, streaming. All you need a licence for. So if you browser or mp3 player wants to support H.264, guess what? They have to pay for licences. Especially freeware like Firefox or Opera would be screwed over by this.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[RAMMS EIN]

``I don't care as much about the codecs being open source or closed source - I'm mainly interested in which format offers the higher quality at the same (or lower) bitrate.''

I, too, care about which format offers the higher quality at the same (or lower) bitrate. But I'm pragmatic enough to not want to have to jump through hoops if I want to install the software on my computer (on whatever OS I happen to be running), fix any bugs that I encounter while using it, or maybe even audit the software. And I don't want to get in trouble with the law over watching or encoding a video.

If MPEG-LA or any other organization wants to offer a video format that I cannot legally use, or for which a codec that allows me to do all the things I want cannot legally be implemented and distributed, that's fine with me. However, I then won't be using the format. Getting slightly better video quality isn't worth the hassle, annoyance, and security risks of typical "we care more about our anti-piracy measures than about our customers" software. If anyone else does want to use such software, fine by me.

The only point where this becomes a problem is when we are talking about standardizing on a format. Standardizing on a format that is not free to implement and use is a very bad idea. Not because it cannot be made to work, but because of pragmatic reasons: there will be barriers, and those barriers will hinder implementation and adoption. All the major players including MPEG-LA recognize this. That's why MPEG-LA is offering this "free for the most common uses" licensing: without that, H.264 would be a huge hassle. Similarly, Flash only became as widespread as it is because the player is freely available for the most popular platforms, TrueType won out over Type1 because of better licensing conditions, and free software is all over the software development world because you can use it without having to jump through hoops.

Ask yourself this: being pragmatic, how much are you willing to pay and how much work are you prepared to do to get to (legally) use H.265, the new and wonderful (and at this point, hypothetic) video format that is even better than H.264? At what point would you, for pragmatic reasons, decide to go with VP12, the (also hypothetic) video format that is almost as good, and free for all to use for any purpose, with free software codecs that you can install with a single click or command?

Re:I'm pragmatic

[TheRaven64]

When did the definition of 'pragmatic' change to mean 'only care about short-term consequences'? I'm seeing this usage a lot recently, but I don't know where it comes from.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, apparently it's 'pragmatic' that it's illegal to use the video camera you bought for your one man company for commercial purposes. It's also 'pragmatic' that you need to figure out the licensing before you can put the video up on your web site.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not practical. It's short sighted. Don't confuse the two.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[domatic]

'Pragmatic' has become a code word for "short term expedience" when one wants to shout down those worried about legality or freedom-to-implement. What is expedient now can very well turn out not to be 'pragmatic' in the long-term.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Pentium100]

No, I don't. I live in a country where software patents are not valid.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[dave420]

Then you're not being pragmatic. What's the point in putting crappy-looking video on the web (using WebM), and only have a competitor create a very similar website (but use h.264) and show your site up for the horrific-looking stutter-fest that it would be? That's not pragmatic, but stupid.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[dave420]

You do realise that you can use h.264 for free for most uses? And if you don't qualify for free, the prices are practically trivial at the scale of business you'd have to be engaged in to require licensing? Apparently not.

And the difference isn't just "slightly better", but massively better. There is no hardware support for WebM, for example. That's massive. Also, WebM isn't supported in most standalone A/V hardware, as it's a massive outsider of a codec, already technically surpassed.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[dave420]

No, you can use that camera for professional work, without paying a dime. It's only if you sell massive numbers of pieces of work, numbering in the thousands, that you might have to pay *shock* $0.02 per copy. The horror!!! Oh, and you can put that video on your website, and stream it without worry. If you are selling access to the video, and have under 100,000 subscribers, you don't have to pay anything. It's only when you have hundreds of subscribers do you have to pay, and even then it's practically nothing. So please stop lying.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you guarantee it will always be so? Because MPEG-LA won't.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[dave420]

MPEG LA has no business raising the licensing costs. It will only serve to lose them customers. H.264 is as popular and widespread as it is because of this position. If they changed, they'd lose support, and that would cause them to lose massive amounts of market share.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting slightly better video quality isn't worth the hassle, annoyance, and security risks of typical "we care more about our anti-piracy measures than about our customers" software.

I see you graduated from Microsoft's school of FUD with first class honours. Congrats!

Re:I'm pragmatic

[RAMMS EIN]

``You do realise that you can use h.264 for free for most uses? And if you don't qualify for free, the prices are practically trivial at the scale of business you'd have to be engaged in to require licensing? Apparently not.''

Yes, I do realize that. In fact, I made a statement about that in my previous post: MPEG-LA is offering this "free for most uses" licensing. I am sorry if that wasn't clear enough.

Of course, the reason MPEG-LA is offering "free for most uses" licensing is that more burdensome licensing would be a quick way to lose the standardization race.

``And the difference isn't just "slightly better", but massively better.''

I'll take your word for it. Still, I think all of H.264, Theora, and WebM offer better video quality at a given bitrate than H.263, which is or was widely considered good enough.

``There is no hardware support for WebM, for example.''

Again, I'll take your word for it. But I don't really get this argument. There was a time at which there was no hardware support for H.264, too. And a time when there wasn't hardware support for H.263. And a time when there wasn't hardware support for DivX. And even a time when there wasn't hardware support for MP3. All these formats have nevertheless gone on to be very popular, and have eventually received hardware support. The same could happen to WebM.

Also, you mentioned hardware support right after you claimed that H.264 was "massively better" than WebM. I don't know if you meant to imply that hardware support makes the format better, but if you did, you are not using "better" in the same sense I was. I was talking about "better video quality" (at a given bitrate), which is orthogonal to hardware support.

I hope that clarifies some possible misunderstandings. Also, to make it perfectly clear: I am not arguing that WebM is a better format than H.264, or even as good. I'm also not saying that H.264 is better. I am saying that, for pragmatic reasons, I prefer licensing that gives me more freedom and less hassle, and that if you want to standardize on something, the less burdensome it is to interested parties, the better.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[thejynxed]

But then you run into the situation where your market is entirely excluded because of that fact.

Re:I'm pragmatic

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no hardware support for WebM, for example. That's massive.

I have hardware accelerated decoding of WebM and Theora both on my phone and on my desktop. Not only is the "no hardware support" argument just plain wrong it's also rather short sighted. By this line of reasoning there would never be any change in video codecs.

It's really rather irrelevant. YouTube, for example, has only been around for five and half years. In that time they've gone through three major codec transitions: H.263 on to H.264 and now on to WebM. "Hardware support" has not mattered in each of those instances as it will always follow the content. Regardless, plenty of current and future devices possess the ability to play WebM content.

Not Google but Mozilla

[Per Cederberg]

The natural party to sue would be Mozilla or Opera here, not Google I think. Google already pay the appropriate license fees for YouTube, so there seems to be very little of a legal case there.

Re:Not Google but Mozilla

[feranick]

The lawsuit against Google would concern the alleged violation of MPEG-LA's patents in Google's WebM, not in the unlicensed use of h264...

Re:Not Google but Mozilla

[Per Cederberg]

It's the same patents as far as MPEG LA is concerned. Google already licenses these (via YouTube at least), so can't be sued over that it seems. I find it hard to believe that they'd sue over statements Google has made regarding WebM.

Opera and Mozilla on the other hand, have no license. And now distribute WebM codecs. Hence a better target.

Re:Not Google but Mozilla

[TheRaven64]

Nope. Patent licenses can be fairly specific and the ones from MPEG-LA are very specific. It's not a matter of licensing the patent, you license the patent for a specific purpose. It is still infringement if you distribute something else which is unlicensed. They will be licensing the patents to use an H.264 encoder on YouTube and to distribute an H.264 decoder in Chrome. Nothing else will be covered.

Re:Not Google but Mozilla

[dave420]

And the cap for enterprises is $5m per year for all royalties owed to MPEG LA, so I doubt Google will be thinking twice about paying it. In case you wonder, if they were paying for only YouTube (and they aren't - Google's use of h.264 is widespread) that works out to around $0.000007 for every video YouTube serves, and covers anything and everything Google wants to do with h.264 content.

Re:Not Google but Mozilla

[feranick]

Which is one of the main reasons Google developed WebM in first place: Not to have to license h236 encoding and decoding from MPEG-LA.

Re:Not Google but Mozilla

[feranick]

The use (encoding and decoding) of a licensed technology is not the same as modifying a patented technology. Google licensed the use of h264 for Youtube and Chrome. Assuming that MPEG-LA is correct about patent infringement in WebM, than Google's licensing over the use of h264 would not apply, because their original license does not allow for modifications or derived work. The fact that Mozilla and Opera use WebM is irrelevant. The alleged problem here is that WebM is potentially an unlicensed modification of patented technology. MPEG-LA is so sure of it that they are already working on a specific licensing for WebM: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/05/21/133249/MPEG-LA-Considering-Patent-Pool-For-VP8WebM
Obviously it remain to be proven that WebM really is derived work. If yes, it's a major blow for Google (with unpleasent effects for Opera and Mozilla as well). If not, obviously this is a major win for Google, WebM and open formats in general.

By the way, in essence this is the same issue Google is facing with Oracle's Java lawsuit (i.e. derived, unlicensed work of a non compatible version of java).

I can't wait to see what happens.

Re:Not Google but Mozilla

[Per Cederberg]

You're mixing copyright with patent law. Derived work is a copyright term. Patents prohibits you from implementing an idea (in software, possibly only in a certain way).

Another commenter remarked on what might be the issue here. And that is the exact terms of the patent licenses used by MPEG-LA. Being a contract agreement, it might stipulate any terms really. And it seems they are frequently limited not just to specific patents, but also to detailed purposes (i.e. decode or encode H264.1 video streams, broadcast said streams, etc).

So, my bad for not realizing the detailed scope of the patent licensed used here. The situation might indeed be similar to the Oracle case, although those patent licenses are specific in a very different way.

(Patent) war! What is it good for!

[syousef]

(Patent) war! What is it good for!? Absolutely nothing.
H.264. What is it good for!? Absolutely nothing.

Sing it with me everybody!

Shakespear had it right you know

[Anonymous Coward]

First, kill all the lawyers. Yeah, sure, we'll have some confusion, initially, but... Come on, really. You know it's definitely, at least, worth a try.

Re:Shakespear had it right you know

[Torvac]

im all for that. lawyers making money out of thin air should be shot. its like parasites feeding on human innovation potential, nothing is gained here, it just slows everything down.

Re:Shakespear had it right you know

[halfaperson]

Let me guess, you've been to that Klingon Shakespeare play?

Re:Shakespear had it right you know

[dpilot]

This is a sad commentary. It has been posted many times, many places, and I once saw a fascinating response by a lawyer.

Essentially:

Absent the Law, we are all at the mercy of the powerful. The Law is what gives the little guy some rights, and makes it so he doesn't have to simply and always say "How high?" when someone rich and powerful says, "Jump!" Lawyers are supposed to be the people who give the masses access to those rights under the Law. Sure, there are bad apples among lawyers, but when the masses start to lose faith in the entire practice, they start to lose the effective underpinnings of their freedom.

My comment:

This makes a sort of sense, as it used to be the Kings Word was the Law, until the days of the Magna Charta. (Really, that document only shared power from the King to the nobles, but after that some kept flowing downhill.) In general, one might say that the Law exists to protect the little guys from the rich and powerful, and that the rich and powerful can generally take care of themselves. I guess it's reasonable that the Law also protects the rich and powerful from masses of little guys, though I think if they need that protection, circumstances require very careful examination. Sometimes I think that that's where we are moving in the US, today.

Re:Shakespear had it right you know

[darkmeridian]

LOL. Shakespeare said that the first step for a tyrant to seize power is to kill all the lawyers to make sure that no one can stand up for the rest of the masses as they got arrested and thrown into the company.

Re:Shakespear had it right you know

[Anonymous Coward]

And if it doesn't work, you can sue me!

Re:Shakespear had it right you know

[alexo]

Absent the Law, we are all at the mercy of the powerful. The Law is what gives the little guy some rights, and makes it so he doesn't have to simply and always say "How high?" when someone rich and powerful says, "Jump!"

Therefore the law must be formulated in such way that it is understandable by the average person.

Lawyers are supposed to be the people who give the masses access to those rights under the Law.

Except that they don't give access, they sell it, resulting in "rights" that, according to your reasoning, have to be purchased and are inaccessible to those without means.

Sure, there are bad apples among lawyers,

Unfortunately it's the 99% of the lawyers that give the rest a bad name.

but when the masses start to lose faith in the entire practice, they start to lose the effective underpinnings of their freedom.

When your "freedom" is measured by your disposable income, you are not free.

It's been told that America has the finest justice money can buy. Lawyers (currently) exist to perpetuate this system.

Re:Shakespear had it right you know

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that was Mussolini's plan too.

That makes no sense

[SuperKendall]

It seems an obvious requirement now to me that any 'international standards', as H.264 is described in TFA, should not be written by a consortium that have a collection of patents on the only possible implementation of the standard!

How does that make any sense?

In todays heavily legal world, the ONLY kinds of standards you can rely on are ones where members of the standards group hold patents and pledges the protected use of same to people following that standard.

Any other approach pretty much ensures that (1) no-one will take on the legal risk of using your standard, and (2) that you will be hit by patent trolls or even just random holders.

Frankly, I of the opinion that standards groups SHOULD be able to hold a patent hammer over implementations of said standard outside the group, because a standard means nothing without enforcement as Microsoft has taught us all too well. I want standards to be adhered to, not fragmented - and many standards bodies provide free licensing for open source implementations so it's not like it's really blocking that much work.

Re:That makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you shut the fuck up, greaseball.

Re:That makes no sense

[martin-boundary]

In todays heavily legal world, the ONLY kinds of standards you can rely on are ones where members of the standards group hold patents and pledges the protected use of same to people following that standard.

Erm, no. You can't rely on companies and individuals implementing a standard. They'll implement anything they like regardless, and then you'll have interoperability issues, pretty much as we have now anyway.

If you want a standard to be reliably implemented in a wide range of systems, you have to take out the "implementation" part of the equation. That means, distribute a public domain or BSD library which does all the hard work, and let everyone piggyback on that for nothing.

Eminent Domain exists for this

[snookums]

Cases like this are ones where the US government (assuming these are US patents) should step up and use their powers of eminent domain to acquire these patents, declare H.264 a government standard (like AES and DES before it) and release the patents (or a perpetual license thereto) into the public domain.

The developers of H.264 and other codecs have certainly put in a lot of research and hard thinking. I believe their algorithms should be patentable (as opposed to "software" patents that are really on UI patterns and business methods), and I believe the inventors should be justly compensated. However, for maximal furtherance of the creative arts, information interchange formats need to be standardized and unencumbered. The visual entertainment industry contributes far, far more to the US economy than the codec-designing industry, and always will. An indirect subsidy like this would be an excellent stimulus.

If they had any sense, the MPAA would by lobbying the government to make this happen, rather than trying to shore up their old distribution models with copyright crackdowns. Getting free (gratis), standard, H.264 decoders into the hands of billions of people worldwide would give them a huge boost to their audience. Unfortunately, since they represent motion picture distributors, they're probably in favour of steep licensing fees to keep the barrier to entry high for content producers wishing to distribute independently.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[martin-boundary]

I believe their algorithms should be patentable

Algorithms are just mathematics. I for one believe mathematics should not be patentable, even though it's one of the hardest subjects on earth.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Anonymous Coward]

I could imagine where the human race would be, if SIN, PI and multiplication, for example, had been patented in earlier times.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[FrootLoops]

Why? I'm inclined to agree, but why?

It's certainly helpful to society for fundamental knowledge to be completely free: addition, multiplication, 0, binary, etc. Some advanced topics might fall into that category too (say... Riemannian geometry which backs General Relativity, or the linear algebra backing Quantum). But how is it helpful to society for, say, the Green-Tao Theorem to be unpatentable? I think most mathematicians would publish their results, effectively freeing them, regardless of patent laws. But I don't see why Terrence Tao and Ben Green shouldn't be allowed to patent their idea if they found a real-world use for it and were so inclined.

I'd bet almost no pure math is done for the money. People that smart should be able to play the stock market if they wanted to, for instance. Is it this convenient accident--that most mathematicians simply don't care much about money or royalties or what have you--that's really behind the idea that math *shouldn't* be patentable? What would we say if mathematicians fought tooth and nail for patent protection instead of quietly pretty much ignoring any such thing? I'd guess our idealism would vanish in the face of real humans really wanting money for their work.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most mathematicians would publish their results, effectively freeing them, regardless of patent laws

The problem isn't with the most; It's the few who do not who can wreck untold havoc on everybody elses expense if we were to give them patent rights and the protection that comes along with it.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Anonymous Coward]

1) because there's no reason to limit it.

2) because mathematicians are discovering facts that are already there, not inventing new stuff.
        It's like you go to the ocean and watch and see a new fish and say "I invented that fish". That's mad.

>But how is it helpful to society for, say, the Green-Tao Theorem [wikipedia.org] to be unpatentable?

Are you arguing for facts about prime numbers, that is, the basis of all symbolic computation, to be patentable? If it were, we couldn't do anything anymore - who knows which programs inadvertently contain such an arithmetic progression of "prime numbers" (i.e. symbols).

>But I don't see why Terrence Tao and Ben Green shouldn't be allowed to patent their idea if they found a real-world use for it and were so inclined.

They can try to patent that real-world use if it is an invention that is not obvious to someone skilled in the field and has not been done before and is technical in nature.
Patent a law of nature, no.

>that most mathematicians simply don't care much about money or royalties or what have you--that's really behind the idea that math *shouldn't* be patentable?

No, it's that it's unethical to say you own "your creation" when in fact you just discovered what is already there.

>I'd guess our idealism would vanish in the face of real humans really wanting money for their work.

No.

The patent system, unjust as it is, at least had a little bit of justification in the beginning: a contract between society and an inventor: The inventor gets to profit from his invention as the only party for a few years (which means society coerces its other members not to), but for that, society gets the _detailed_ description how to build his invention.

Before that, it was argued that people would just keep the "secret sauce" to themselves and profit of it until they die and then nobody knows how to do it anymore.

If there was any secret sauce of mathematics that I couldn't use, that would devalue the entire field for me. I'd be ashamed for us as a species.

And note that the "money" argument is not what patents are really about (well, in the end, almost everything is about money, but I mean directly). I wish people would see that.
It's power. Power over everyone. Power not to let you do something, _no matter how much you would be willing to pay_. Just being able to say "no" and being backed by an entire country.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[dargaud]

People that smart should be able to play the stock market if they wanted to, for instance

Stock market shouldn't be a game. It should be what it was originally designed to be: a way for company to raise money for their own development. Not a game, not a pile of cards of companies purchasing each others, not a lottery, etc...

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[martin-boundary]

You can't separate pure and applied mathematics. You simply never know when a pure result will have an applied interpretation, or when an applied problem leads to a deep or pure generalization.

Also, historically, just about all the great mathematicians have worked on both pure and applied problems without making a clear distinction.

But I don't see why Terrence Tao and Ben Green shouldn't be allowed to patent their idea if they found a real-world use for it and were so inclined.

Well, the integers and prime numbers are fundamental building block of mathematics, in some sense universal to many other categories. So if that kind of idea was patented, then people working in a different field of mathematics might be affected because some property they rely on is really a universal property derived from the integers.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[TheRaven64]

You could probably do something similar with a standards body without any government involvement. You create a standard, publish the draft, and then solicit patents and money. After a fixed period, you divide the money up among the patent holders. If the amount is considered adequate for a perpetual license for the patents, you release the standard as final. If not, you solicit more money until it is. You make sure that the terms are well known, and then you use the doctrine of latches to prevent any other patents from being asserted against the standard.

If you want to get money from the standard, you declare your patent early, or you risk not getting anything. If you want to use the standard, you put up some money to be released to the inventors once the standard is finalised. If you declare your patent but refuse to license it, the standard can work around it. If you don't declare your patent then you are prevented from enforcing it later.

I'm not a fan of software patents in general, but I would be in favour of compensating people who do something original and creative, although only once, not in perpetuity.

The other poster, who claimed that mathematics is just documenting things that are already there, and is more akin to a discovery than an invention, is an idiot. Mathematics is the only truly artificial, man-made, thing that exists. It can describe parts of nature, but you won't find it anywhere in nature.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Richard_at_work]

At what point do you draw the line, as everything can be resolved back to mathematics...

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[jez9999]

No, it's that it's unethical to say you own "your creation" when in fact you just discovered what is already there.

Just to be anal, nobody really ever discovers anything... they just manipulate and put together particles that were already there in a particular configuration. ;-)

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[jez9999]

And of course I had to make a mistake. s/discovers/invents/.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you believe mathematics should not be patentable? I'm sincerely asking that on the presumption that you're not being disingenuous - that you think there are other things that should be patentable, and i'd guess those are material gadgets.

So I'd like to know why you make the distinction. Why should a new and clever physical solution to trapping mice be granted a period of market protection, while a new and clever algorithm for a software problem shouldn't?

I know I don't have a good argument for that one, so I'd like to hear yours. It's non-obvious.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[bieber]

Cases like this are ones where the US government (assuming these are US patents) should step up and use their powers of eminent domain to acquire these patents, declare H.264 a government standard (like AES and DES before it) and release the patents (or a perpetual license thereto) into the public domain.

Or, they could sidestep all that nonsense and just pass some common-sense laws that prevent individuals from obtaining a monopoly on friggin' mathematics. You talk about incentives for industry...what kind of incentive for the software industry do you think it is for the US to be one of the select few nations in the world where you can write some piece of software entirely out of your own effort, only to find that someone else "owns" the techniques that you've implemented and watch them destroy your livelihood without a single thing you can do about it? Who in their right mind would start a software company in that kind of legal atmosphere?

And even if we ignore the inanity of software patents for now...are you seriously suggesting that the government should just step in and use eminent domain to take "property" from smaller industries and just give it away to industries that "contribute far, far more to the US economy?" That would just be a great incentive not to start up any kind of business in the US, as the government could just step in and take it away from you to give to someone they deem more important at any time...

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Anonymous Coward]

But the stock market isn't a "game, not a pile of cards of companies purchasing each others, not a lottery, etc...".

It may resemble a game of cards, but it is not a game of cards. (because there are no cards).

The stock market also wasn't originally "a way for company to raise money for their own development".
It was a way for people to trade livestock.

please, at least google or look at wikipedia, before posting.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[TheoMurpse]

I for one believe mathematics should not be patentable

To be fair, pretty much anything can be expressed as math. You should at least acknowledge that you're calling for the abolition of nearly all patents.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Anonymous Coward]

You make sure that the terms are well known, and then you use the doctrine of latches to prevent any other patents from being asserted against the standard.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that only work for past infringement? That is, you go to MPEG-LA and say "H.264 infringes my patent" and you can't collect for patent infringement for everything that has been sold already because you knew about it, but you can still say "give me a zillion dollars or stop distributing it" and still get an injunction against "future infringements." Then everybody would have to either pay you a zillion dollars or modify the standard (and re-encode every video, throw away all the hardware that has a hardware decoder, etc.)

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[TheRaven64]

Latches can be a bit fuzzy. There are some specific clauses in US patent law saying that you can't sue for any damages that occurred between finding out that the infringement occurred and notifying the infringing parties. More generally, however, the doctrine of latches can apply to say that you can't permit something for a while and then later sue for it, because you've already granted implicit permission. It's up to the court to decide whether this is what happened, but you'd have a reasonable case if you made a public standard, invited people to be compensated for their patents if you infringed them, and they didn't come forward. This is one of the reasons things like the MPEG patent pools exist - to make it much harder for someone to sue if they aren't in the pool. They'd have to provide some reasonable explanation to the court of why they didn't opt into the pool in the first place.

Governments could, of course, strengthen this by stating that any patent that is infringed by a published standard must declare this within one year of the standard being published or be invalid with respect to that standard. That would go a long way towards preventing submarine patents in standards.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[westlake]

Cases like this are ones where the US government (assuming these are US patents) should step up and use their powers of eminent domain to acquire these patents, declare H.264 a government standard (like AES and DES before it) and release the patents (or a perpetual license thereto) into the public domain.

There are 27 H.264 licensors.

No more than four are American.

A dozen are Asian giants in manufacturing - companies like Mitsubishi and Samsung. Seizing assets in peacetime from your major trading partners invites retaliation.

In a recession, this is lunacy.

How do your force Sony to design and export the WebM-enabled camcorder, video game console or HDTV? You can't.

Not without legislation - and more political repercussions.

More importantly, how do you build a global market for WebM?

Lenovo is designing a video game console for the Chinese market. For Lenovo H.264 licensing amounts to less than your own pocket change.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Seeteufel]

Basically we need s Billionaire to sponsor patent reform. Someone like Paul Allen... wait...

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Seeteufel]

Basically there is a need for an investment in patent reform policies. But the ICT industry prefers to feed the lawyers.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[martin-boundary]

Why should a new and clever physical solution to trapping mice be granted a period of market protection, while a new and clever algorithm for a software problem shouldn't?

I don't know why it *should*, but a physical mousetrap is not an idea, it is a realization of an idea. That is not the case with mathematics, which describes relationships between ideas. Patents were invented to protect physical devices from being copied (so not software, which is writing, or the abominations called "business method patents").

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[martin-boundary]

I don't think I am. There is a difference between expressing an idea in writing, and building a physical device. Patents were originally intended to protect physical devices from being substantially copied.

If I come up with an idea, like a space rocket, but haven't actually built the rocket and don't even know if it might be possible to build it as conceived, then that's not the same as having an actual patentable rocket. At best, I should have copyright on the rocket designs if I actually sat down and drew them.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[Anonymous Coward]

The mathematics themselves are not patented. What is patented is performing a specific task using those mathematics. You're perfectly welcome to use any technique(s) in H.264 to accomplish any task other than A/V compression.

Your argument is akin to saying that Silicon and the various metals are just elements and since elements should not be patentable it follows that there should be no patents on circuit boards because they're made of Silicon and other metals.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[TheoMurpse]

Patents were originally intended to protect physical devices from being substantially copied.

So I guess you need to define what you mean by "mathematics" should not be patentable then. If you mean "algorithms," then mathematical algorithms as implemented on a computer absolutely are physical devices.

Can you give me an example of a patented algorithm you find objectionable? I'd like to know what I'm arguing against here.

If I come up with an idea, like a space rocket, but haven't actually built the rocket and don't even know if it might be possible to build it as conceived, then that's not the same as having an actual patentable rocket.

This makes me think you misunderstand US patent law. You cannot get a patent unless the subject matter has been reduced to practice.

And surely we can agree that requiring literal reduction to practice is not a good policy. You'd make it impossible for a poor person with a great idea to patent it! If you came up with an idea for a space rocket, you could never build it! Those things cost billions of dollars.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[martin-boundary]

So I guess you need to define what you mean by "mathematics" should not be patentable then. If you mean "algorithms," then mathematical algorithms as implemented on a computer absolutely are physical devices.

The wikipedia entry is a fairly good definition: "In mathematics, computer science, and related subjects, an algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem expressed as a finite sequence of instructions." So here an algorithm is not actually the computer (together with a particular bit configuration in RAM) which ends up doing the work.

Can you give me an example of a patented algorithm you find objectionable?

LZW. See the section on patents.

This makes me think you misunderstand US patent law. You cannot get a patent unless the subject matter has been reduced to practice.

I was exaggerating slightly with the rocket, but this is very much the problem with software patents, where the claims are usually much too vague to represent a single physical device or even a limited class of technological devices.

And surely we can agree that requiring literal reduction to practice is not a good policy. You'd make it impossible for a poor person with a great idea to patent it! If you came up with an idea for a space rocket, you could never build it! Those things cost billions of dollars.

We'll have to disagree on this. If the poor person can't actually demonstrate the rocket, I see no reason why the claim should actually be examined (let alone granted or not). There has to be a prior proof of feasibility (a "working model" in the link you provided earlier), otherwise the patent system degenerates into a registry for people who can be bothered (and have the means) to file.

The original purpose of patent systems (IMHO) is not to equalize the opportunities of rich and poor inventors, but rather to reward the creation of non trivial real devices.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[TheoMurpse]

The original purpose of patent systems (IMHO) is not to equalize the opportunities of rich and poor inventors, but rather to reward the creation of non trivial real devices.

Actually the original purpose of patent systems was to encourage the disclosure of something that would otherwise be a trade secret.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[martin-boundary]

That's the case in the US, but in the countries of Europe for example, the earliest patent systems were solely intended to create revenue (for the local monarchy) from selling monopolies to individuals.

Re:Eminent Domain exists for this

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know why it *should*, but a physical mousetrap is not an idea, it is a realization of an idea.

Only one particular copy of said mousetrap. But we don't patent individual copies, we patent the idea of a mousetrap. And such an idea is (as any other physical process) ultimately defined in terms of pure math.

Wrong

[SuperKendall]

First thing to be noted is that any deal they offer today can be withdrawn in five years anyway.

Nope. What part of "royalty free forever" did you not understand? If you read that third link again you'll find it USED TO BE five year periods but now lasts until the patents expire, which essentially means forever since it's all moot after the expiration.

That argument is dead now.

so there is no way for firefox to offer this.

They have more than enough money to pay for this and also could distribute a standalone player module for Linux - because after all, on other platforms they could simply use the native h.264 playback facilities that both Apple and Microsoft offer.

I understand philosophically where Firefox is coming from but it's not a practical fight and not one Firefox can do anything but be hurt by as more and more users switch to other browsers like Chrome that can play back h.264.

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "royalty free forever" did you not understand?

A lot more than you apparently. Its royalty free for only ONE SPECIFIC type of streaming. AND you still need a licensed (not free) encoder/decoders. AND they can change their mind. The court fees for any defense you feel entitled too are yours to bear.

so there is no way for Firefox to offer this.

They have more than enough money to pay for this..

The 5million a year does not get you the right for 3rd party distribution. Firefox would not be permitted to be part of any Linux distribution for example with them also paying the 5 million. You would not longer be allowed to give a copy of a distribution to a friend. 3rd party distribution like this will *never* be permitted by MPEG-LA. Not permitting unrestricted 3rd party distribution is a violation of the Mozilla/GPL etc type license. It is simply not legal in the US and other countries that support software patents.

Re:Wrong

[SanityInAnarchy]

also could distribute a standalone player module for Linux - because after all, on other platforms they could simply use the native h.264 playback facilities that both Apple and Microsoft offer.

They could also have used native Linux playback facilities -- nVidia offers hardware-accelerated h.264 on Linux, and presumably they've paid for the license if they're putting it in hardware.

Firefox is proving, again and again, that this is a purely political fight for them.

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[Adolf Hitroll]

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Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

You can pirate everything and never be able to do proper commercial stuff with your computer. Or you can do it the right legal way and be able to make some money off of it. The problem is of a legal nature. It's not about what you can do at your home when nobody looks. It's more about what you can do in a firm or organization which is subject to some oversight. MPEG LA have said that they do not see a possibility that there is such a thing as a codec that does not violate their patents. And there are problems with getting for instance Full-HD recording equipment which is not subject to h264 patents.

Still not making sense

[SuperKendall]

If you want a standard to be reliably implemented in a wide range of systems, you have to take out the "implementation" part of the equation.

That's why every single DVD player or network router or TV is exactly the same.

Oh wait.

Actually real standards are all about defining the STANDARD that implementations have to follow, sometimes providing a reference implementation to ensure a base level of quality but in no way forcing people to use that. Does the fact that SMTP is a standard mean that everyone uses the same mail server? Of course not!

A library is not a standard. A standard is what you can use to build a library.

Re:Still not making sense

[martin-boundary]

That's why every single DVD player or network router or TV is exactly the same.

Huh? DVD player and TV manufacturers normally buy hardware decoder chips, they don't implement the standards themselves. A DVD player is just a branded plastic box with outsourced components in it. So of course they all work pretty much the same, since they are pretty much the same when you look under the covers.

A library is not a standard. A standard is what you can use to build a library.

True, but the world is full of standards nobody uses, and a standard you have to pay for is infinitely less desirable than a free library that does the work for you. You simply won't get stability in the internet ecosystem solely from a standard (and that's what you're arguing after all), you ALSO need to ensure that people don't try to implement it themselves.

Re:Still not making sense

[NoMaster]

Huh? DVD player and TV manufacturers normally buy hardware decoder chips, they don't implement the standards themselves.

True for the MPEG decoder, not so much for the virtual machine that controls all aspects of DVD playback. VM implementations vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and sometimes even from model to model from the same manufacturer. Without naming names, sometimes it's a crapshoot of things like 'where is this particular player going to get the AR info from - the IFO file? The VOB header? The MPEG-2 stream headers? Will it have a branching bug, or a generic register overflow bug? '

I recall one memorably bad model which seemed to clear GP registers when executing a Compare-Link instruction, effectively making certain complex menus useless...

Lest this seem esoteric, I'll point out that both Matroska (the basis of the WebM file format) and bits of MPEG-4 (e.g. part 16, part 21) allow for similar DVD menu and control-like functionality (although last I looked it remain incomplete and largely unimplemented in Matroska).

a piece of the pie

[WarJolt]

mpeg-la just wants to make money before google tries to make software patents invalid. Google has a lot to gain from patents going away. Take a google logo and paste it on tons of new apps they can't touch because someone owns a patent to an abstract idea that applies too broadly. Google can outpace any dev team. They only use patents for protection

War

[tsotha]

This article unpacks the history of MPEG LA and then suggests the obvious — it's all because of WebM — and the worrying — maybe it's preparing the ground for opening a third front in the patent war against Google."

Well, I suppose if anyone has the money to fight a three-front patent war it's Google.

Re:War

[Rogerborg]

Yes, "worrying" is for people who don't have $50 billion in the bank. MPEG LA are more than welcome to start a patent ass kicking contest with that 800lb gorilla. Did I mention that it has sixteen legs and no ass?

Not even eminent domain.

[Sycraft-fu]

The government can take patents away for more or less any reason it likes, that congress has passed a law allowing it to. Reason is because patents are a power specifically granted to the government. Physical property ownership is considered more of a natural right. The government doesn't grant you ownership because they can't deny it either. Eminent Domain exists because they can take private property for public use, in certain circumstances, however there has to be compensation.

With patents that's not the case. The government doesn't have to grant patents at all. They have the power to do so, but it isn't required. What that means is the government owns all patents ultimately and can do as they want.

As such there are some peculiarities with patent law many don't know about. The NSA can fine secret patents. If a civilian files the same patent, the NSA patent is then revealed and granted at the time it is revealed. The government is allowed to make a law like that, since patents are one of their explicit powers.

Likewise they can take them for various reasons. Congress hasn't granted unlimited power in that regard, but there are a list of reasons for which they can say "That's ours now," and you get nothing. That was actually threatened in the NTP-RIM case and is probably part of the reason NTP took a settlement that didn't include future fees. NTP was requesting an injunction to shut down Blackberry service. The federal government wrote a brief to the court saying they believed that would have an impact on national security (the US government loves them some Blackberries, they are the biggest customer) and they'd prefer the court didn't grant it. They also noted that if it was, they might simply have to void the patent, which can be done on national security grounds. The judge then strongly suggested the two sides work their shit out now.

Re:Not even eminent domain.

[Hal_Porter]

Likewise they can take them for various reasons. Congress hasn't granted unlimited power in that regard, but there are a list of reasons for which they can say "That's ours now," and you get nothing. That was actually threatened in the NTP-RIM case and is probably part of the reason NTP took a settlement that didn't include future fees. NTP was requesting an injunction to shut down Blackberry service. The federal government wrote a brief to the court saying they believed that would have an impact on national security (the US government loves them some Blackberries, they are the biggest customer) and they'd prefer the court didn't grant it. They also noted that if it was, they might simply have to void the patent, which can be done on national security grounds. The judge then strongly suggested the two sides work their shit out now.

This is kind of cool - the Federal Government intervened and saved Blackberry, deus ex machina style. A bit like Eru Iluvatar doing a rm -rf /arda/Numenor/* && umount /arda/maiar/sauron or remount /arda/maiar/gandalf && bleach -white /arda/maiar/gandalf && rmnod /dev/maiar/balrogs/durins_bane

Re:Not even eminent domain.

[dpilot]

> A bit like Eru Iluvatar doing a rm -rf /arda/Numenor/* && umount /arda/maiar/sauron or remount /arda/maiar/gandalf &&
> bleach -white /arda/maiar/gandalf && rmnod /dev/maiar/balrogs/durins_bane

This deserves some sort of comment or comeback, but I can't for the life of me determine what that should be or what would be appropriate.

Re:Not even eminent domain.

[hedwards]

Eminent Domain exists because they can take private property for public use, in certain circumstances, however there has to be compensation.

The way that usually works is they condemn the property then pay the value of the property after it's been condemned. Meaning pennies on the dollar so that tax payers don't have to cough up for the normal market price of the property. Worse still is that sometimes they'll condemn the only buildable portion of the property and only buy that leaving the developer with no property to develop and no viable way of selling it either. Basically resulting in a complete loss of the property for no gain whatsoever.

Re:Not even eminent domain.

[dave420]

"One does not simply SSH into Mordor"?

I'm not all that worried

[Sycraft-fu]

Google isn't stupid. They got to investigate the format and patents before they bought On2, and of course after once they owned everything. Also, this is precisely the kind of thing Google would be good at: Looking through large amounts of information and figuring out what is relevant. So My guess is that one of both of the following are true:

1) VP8 (WebM) does not infringe on any MPEG-LA patents, or at least not any real ones. They probably have some overly broad BS ones, but Google probably has examples of prior art. Google did an extensive review and found that there was no infringement, VP8 had been engineered to avoid MPEG-LA patents so that it could be sold without additional license.

2) On2, and therefor now Google, holds patents on critical technologies used in H.264. In the event of any infringement suit, they can pull those out and file countersuit. Having WebM stopped would not be a real big deal to Google. They aren't using it for anything important yet. Having H.264 stopped would be devastating for MPEG-LA. Google could thus force them to license all relevant patents, at not charge, in return for the licenses to the Google patents.

Those are my bets. One or both of those is the case and so Google is confident they can win a game of chicken. This also might explain the move by MPEG-LA to put a permanent licensing moratorium on free H.264 stuff, as well as the fact that there is no suit. They may have looked at things and said "Shit, we can't touch VP8. We could try but we'd almost certainly fail and just wind up with a bunch of legal bills, plug give Google an ironclad thing to point to showing WebM is ok." They may have decided it is better to make H.264 look more attractive and perhaps keep up some nebulous threats to make people think twice about implementing WebM.

Always remember that patent warfare is a dangerous game. The trolls can play it because they don't own anything or make anything losing patents means nothing. In MPEG-LA's case, there could be a lot to lose if things went wrong.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[TheRaven64]

On2, and therefor now Google, holds patents on critical technologies used in H.264. In the event of any infringement suit, they can pull those out and file countersuit

I would be amazed if this were possible. Any semi-competent lawyer would ensure that the deal that the patent holders signed with the MPEG-LA was irrevocable, or the MPEG-LA patent licenses are worthless. Given the fact that the MPEG-LA is a group of lawyers, it's almost certain that they insisted on something like this. You get the royalties from them, but you have to allow them an irrevocable right to grant licenses to the patents that you put in the pool.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[koiransuklaa]

I'm sure he meant licenses that are not in the MPEGLA pool, but still cover H.264.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[TheRaven64]

I very much doubt that On2 has any of them. When H.264 was being created, they will have gone through their patents to try to find anything that is covered with the standard and added it to the pool. The more patents they have in the pool, the more money they get from H.264 licensees, and that adds up to a lot of money. They'd have no reason to hold on to patents doing nothing with them if they could put them in the pool and make money from them immediately.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[boxwood]

I don't think On2 was a member of the MPEG-LA.

The MPEG-LA can't simply add anyone's patents to their pool. They have to have permission of the patent holder. Since On2 wrote their codec specifically to get around the patents in H.264, it wouldn't make any sense for them to allow MPEG-LA to add their patents to their pool.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[TheRaven64]

Checking the list, it seems that you're right. That said, the other point still stands. If On2 had any patents that H.264 used, they could have put them in the pool years ago and made a lot of money from them. The fact that they didn't implies that they don't. If they tried now, they'd have problems with latches, because they were clearly aware of the existence of the H.264 standard and chose not to notify anyone of infringement.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[smegmatic]

It is possible that On2 didn't join MPEG-LA so they could be patent trolls later. If so, it would be ironic that their patents would then be used for good by Google.

Similarly, it is also possible that On2 didn't join MPEG-LA so that they would be more attractive to being bought be another company who wanted to acquire patents on some part of H.264.

I have no idea how likely either scenario is, but they don't seem totally implausible.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a competing codec seems to be a good reason in the long term not to join. That is the On2 business after all.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[Anonymous Coward]

2) On2, and therefor now Google, holds patents on critical technologies used in H.264. In the event of any infringement suit, they can pull those out and file countersuit.

It doesn't work that way. MPEG-LA does not have any products. Even if h.264 infringes on some Google/On2 patent, MPEG-LA does not have any infringing products; only its licensees would.

So, for example, the iPhone would infringe on the Google/On2 patent, and Google could then sue Apple. But this would have no impact on MPEG-LA. It's Apple, and all the other h.264 users, that get reamed. Sure, MPEG-LA might lose some revenue if companies decide against implementing .264, but MPEG-LA is just a cash cow anyway. If they don't milk it, they get nothing.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[Anonymous Coward]

They'd have no reason to hold on to patents doing nothing with them if they could put them in the pool and make money from them immediately.

...except to use them in exactly the way the OP suggests, to protect an On2 codec from MPEG-LA.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[TheRaven64]

Nope. If On2 had any relevant patents, being a member of the pool would give them much better protection (pool members cross-license their patents) than some hypothetical MAD strategy. It would give them income from their patents and let them have access to the other patents in the pool.

Re:I'm not all that worried

[sjames]

That's all part of the problem with patents though. You can NEVER know for sure there isn't someone lurking out there with a patent that will be found relevant to what you're doing. NEVER. Even solid proof that the entire invention was your own thought process all the way down to first principles can't protect you.

Why then do MPEGLA not indemnify?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why then do MPEGLA not indemnify? Because there is NO WAY your license agreement with them can stop someone else with a patent being infringed from suing for use of their patent in H.264.

And so your "the ONLY kinds of standards" schtick goes "poof!".

Not legal in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

Not legal in the US and when ACTA comes in, exporting the US patenting, then it won't be legal anywhere else.

(note, the patents may apply in other regions now as well, this is not a US-specific problem, but it IS a problem with x-264: IT IS NOT FREE). Unless they don't catch you and jail you for breaking patent law.

Re:Not legal in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

x264 isn't illegal in the US. Google, Facebook and other US based companies use x264 for video encoding. The project itself won't be illegal when ACTA comes along either. The MPEG LA has the source code of their H.264 reference encoder and decoder freely available and anyone can download and compile it. With x264 it isn't different. Licensing only comes into play when you distribute more than 100.000 binaries or hardware implementations. Downloading source code and using it is in itself not restricted, just distribution of finished products is. x264 currently offers a commercial license similar to the LGPL, but that only covers the use of the source code. The licensing from the MPEG LA must be sorted out by the companies using it; that is if their use even requires a license.

"Sword of Damocles" you muppet

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sword of Damocles" you muppet. "Oh, there's no problem with my house on the edge of this cliff! You said it could collapse in 2011 five years ago, and look! you were wrong! So it's absolutely saaaaaaaaaahhhhh....." NO CARRIER

Who does their "free" licence benefit?

[ciaran_o_riordan]

The main problem caused by MPEG-LA is that people can't distribute video software. GNU/Linux distros have to worry about distributing software that supports H.264, and developers have to worry about adding support to their apps. Documenting this situation is my hobby horse but this "free" licence" is so limited, I can't find much to write about it. It won't make H.264 safe for standards like HTML5 either.

They promise not to sue non-commercial distributors of video (no ads allowed on the webpage). That means I'm safe to publish videos of me singing karaoke, but no one was going to sue me for that anyway. The only real case I can think of is public service television, which could put their shows online now without worry, but they'd have to be very careful about not having anything that could be called an ad on their webpage. Is that really the extent of this "free" licence that such a fuss is being made about?

• MPEG video formats
• VP8 and WebM
• Audio-video patents

Yes, it IS illegal in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it IS illegal in the US. This is because it is using a method that is patented in the US and has no license for it.

If you can show that the US patent is not being used in x-264 then I will concede your point.

Re:Yes, it IS illegal in the US

[Pharmboy]

I thought it worked the other way around, where they had to prove that x264 is using patented info, not the other way around.

H264 pretty much is a US government standard.

[Anonymous Coward]

They use it everywhere.

War war WAR!

[GF678]

Why must everything be a "war"?

The browser wars
The operating system wars
The friggin' video codec wars

Everyone wants to get into fights for some reason, when all that's really happening is competition.

Re:War war WAR!

[neminem]

Not exactly a new thought... lyrics to a song from frelling 1994 (it's a great song, by the way):

Peace is Out
words and music by Roy Zimmerman

We used to take a nonviolent stance
In Nehru jackets and bell-bottom pants
We even used to sing, "Give peace a chance"
God, we must have been joking

We used to slander the words of our prez
And praise whatever the Tao Te Ching says
We used to wanna sing like Joan Baez
Jesus, what we were smoking?

Now when someone says, "Hell no, we won't go"
What they mean is "to Berkeley"

Peace is out, love is out
No one wants to hear about
Peace and love anymore
Now we're fighting
In a war against homelessness, a war against drugs
'Cause it's in to be in a war

We used to traipse around in tie-dye tights
Dropping daisies in enemy sights
Now we're fighting for property rights
Must have come to our senses

We used to say all we needed was love
Olive branches and sign of the dove
Now we're looking for something above
90K plus expenses

Now when someone says, "What the world needs now"
It's a private police force

Peace is out, love is out
No one wants to hear about
Peace and love anymore
Now we're fighting
In a war against joblessness, a war against crime
'Cause it's in to be in a war

All we wanna say
Is peace... ain't PC, it's passé

Now when someone says, "We shall overcome"
They mean, "We'll be right over"

Peace is out, love is out
No one gives a rat's ass about
Peace and love anymore
Now we're fighting
In a war against violence, a war against poverty
A war against ignorance, a war against obesity
A war against censorship, a war against cavities
'Cause it's in to be in... in to be in...
in to be in... a war.

Invention is not maths, though it uses maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Invention is not maths, though it uses maths. When you make a mousetrap (patent pending) you use maths to work out the size of the wire trap, the strength of the materials used and then patent the result.

So, not everything is maths.

Software, however, IS MATHS.

Now, a CPU or a design of a logic gate may be built using a software model, but that CPU or gate is patented, not the software for designing a CPU or a gate.

This demarcation only seems to be a problem for those who want to have maths patentable and therefore make money from it.

Re:Invention is not maths, though it uses maths

[dave420]

Of course designing a mousetrap is maths. It's abstracted a lot, but it doesn't stop a successful invention from requiring working mathematical underpinnings.

Re:Invention is not maths, though it uses maths

[shutdown -p now]

So, not everything is maths.

Everything consists of elemental particles. Elemental particles are described by their wave functions. Wave functions are math. Ergo, everything is math.

Those are slightly different examples...

[Qubit]

ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264. You have a bunch of companies that decide to share patents into one resource. It makes it easy for other companies to pay 1 fee and then use the technology. And H.264's licensing terms are reasonable. There is a cost of doing business. I know that is not popular around here, but it's the truth.

But for comparison here, if I own an ARM computer and make a video or some kind of word processing document on it, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from opening that video or that document on your computer with an x86 chip (at least nothing related to the origin of the file being an ARM-powered device).

If you create a video or audio file and encode it with codec XYZ, you can bet your sweet pile of software patents that when you send that file to me I'm going to have to use information about that codec to turn that file back into something my eyes and ears can understand. I have no choice.

Similarly, my phone doesn't have to support W-CDMA for me to be able to call you. I can just use a POTS line. Or use a GSM phone. Sure, I am more limited than I would be were there no software or hardware patents, but at least I have choices.

Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing.

For those curious folk, here's the wikipaedia link for PA-DSS. It appears that people have discussed the PA-DSS + FOSS question before and it really sounds like it's just and issue of someone stepping up and taking control of the process.

Sure, you'll have to pay some money to have the software audited. Sure, you'll have to provide information about how the team audits and creates new releases of the software. Sure, you'll have to jump through certain hoops. But that's what it took when OpenSSL got FIPS 140-2 validation.

Nope, you only have to file a complaint

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you only have to file a complaint. Just like copyright complaints.

And if it's possible for x264 to avoid using MPEGLA patents, then the patents you're licensing are a gyp. Especially since x264 is getting to be a faster and more compliant program than licensed competitors.

So, go ahead, explain why people are paying for a license they don't have to because x264 does encoding/decoding and doesn't require a license.

My explanation is that x264 uses the patents but ignores them because

1) personal use only is not an infringement of patent (else how could you improve on the technology if you couldn't use it without a license?)

2) software patents are not universal (EPO specifically exclude software from patentability).

Re:Nope, you only have to file a complaint

[orgelspieler]

You miss the point. You (or some other AC) said "If you can show that the US patent is not being used in x-264 then I will concede your point." Pharmboy's point is that the burden of proof is always on the person saying something is being done. It's nearly impossible to prove the negative.

I'll give you an example: if you prove that you didn't rape and murder a little girl in 1997, I'll concede that you didn't rape and murder a little girl in 1997. You see? The burden should actually be on me to prove that you did. To pose the statement the other way is not logical.

On to another of your points. I do not know of any "personal use" exception to patent infringement. You might be thinking of copyrights, which do have a fair use defense. There are several research groups that are trying to get Congress to pass a patent fair use exception, though.

How about just banning them?

[Chemisor]

Forbid lawyers in the courtroom. The rationale being that if an average Joe is unable to understand the law, it is a problem with the law, not with Joe. Any law Joe can't understand should be immediately repealed. After all, you do want citizens to know if they are criminals or not, don't you?

Re:How about just banning them?

[JustSomeProgrammer]

What if Joe has an IQ smaller than his shoe size?

Re:How about just banning them?

[Chemisor]

Then you'll end up with a free country.

i smoke crack too

[chronoss2010]

I can pirate everything and make a buck if i wanted too, but dont. ANYWAYS this public service announcement brought to you by ONE BRAIN CELL INC. WHERE having more then one is just too much.

You are not getting the point

[SuperKendall]

Huh? DVD player and TV manufacturers normally buy hardware decoder chips

Yes, and what YOU are saying is that the standards body would make one chip that they all buy.

Of course that is nonsense, multiple chip makers make the chips that implement a STANDARD.

Do you start to see what a stanndard really means? It doesn't mean any one implementation, it's about how to make implementations. A standard is meta.

Re:You are not getting the point

[martin-boundary]

Yes, and what YOU are saying is that the standards body would make one chip that they all buy.

No, I'm saying if the standards body wants the world to use that standard widely and fully, then it would make a free chip that everyone can use as is. Conversely, if the standards body imposes strict licensing requirements which regulate exactly what can and can't be done by anyone who wishes to use the standard, then the world will simply not use the standard widely.

The reason this matters with HTML5 is that if H264 is included in the standard with onerous licensing restrictions, then companies will think twice about making software that's HTML5 compliant. Instead, they'll pick and choose only the pieces in HTML5 that they like, and we'll have a fragmented internet, like in the good old days of Netscape and IE. That would make HTML5 an academic exercise.

Do you start to see what a stanndard really means? It doesn't mean any one implementation, it's about how to make implementations. A standard is meta.

Sure, standards are great. There's always so many to choose from. But if you want most people to use the SAME standard (HTML5), then what it says must be acceptable to most. So far, H264 licensing isn't acceptable.

On2 is not an MPEG-LA member

[Sycraft-fu]

They were interested in selling their own video technology, not casting under H.264. While I'm sure MPEG-La would have welcomed them with open arms, they can't force anything.

Re:On2 is not an MPEG-LA member

[TheRaven64]

The two are not mutually exclusive. If they had patents that covered part of H.264, they had three options:

1. Become part of the patent pool and get some money when people used AVC as well as when people used VP8. This would cost them nothing, give them regular income, and give them something to put in their press releases.
2. Tell the MPEG committee about the patent and make them work around it. This would delay AVC, giving them a commercial advantage by delaying their competitors.
3. Do nothing. The patent still costs them money every year, but they get nothing from it except some vague potential to use it in retaliation against future lawsuits.

The grandparent wants to believe that they picked option 3, in spite of the fact that this option does not give them any advantage.

Nope, you show me the patent isn't being used

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you show me the patent isn't being used and I'll concede the point.

This has naff all to do with legal requirements.

YOU (or some other h264 apologist) show me that x264 doesn't violate MPEGLA patents on the codec and then I'll concede the point.

But MPEGLA may still not consider your proofs adequate and sue x264 for patent violations anyway.

And "fair use" for patents is personal use only. As in you cannot sue someone for implementing your patent if they aren't selling it. It's not fair use or fair dealing, but if you had to buy a patent license before you could see how it works and how it could be improved, the license could tell you you cannot do this.

Personal use of a patent is not a liable action in patent protections.

It isn't an exception like fair use is, it plain is not a liable action.

Re:Nope, you show me the patent isn't being used

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. Others, please don't feed this troll.

So patent the trap, not the maths

[Anonymous Coward]

So patent the trap, not the maths. Go and show me the number 2.56742 in the mousetrap patent.

It doesn't exist.

Since you can patent a moustrap, despite having maths underpinning it, you can patent your other hardware thingy despite "it all being based on math".

Just don't patent the maths.

This includes software.

Simples

Linus was pragmatic choosing BitKeeper

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus was pragmatic choosing BitKeeper. Look at how well that worked out for him.

Pragmatic is a sell-out's code word for "I want you to use this because it's on my Apple iPhone and don't give a shit if it's trouble for anyone else".

Senseless II - the De-Sensining

[SuperKendall]

No, I'm saying if the standards body wants the world to use that standard widely and fully, then it would make a free chip that everyone can use as is.

HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR! Oh my god, you had that troll thing going along OK until you blew your cover there!

Oh man.

Because no standard is in wide use today without a "free chip", that the standards makers give away - wait for it - for free!! Ho Ha Ho He Ho Ho He HA HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!

Re:Senseless II - the De-Sensining

[martin-boundary]

I think we're done here. Good luck in the other threads.