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The Looming Video Codec Fight
itwbennett writes "With both Apple and Microsoft promoting HTML5 standards, you'd think that there would be joy in software freedom land. But instead there's another fight brewing. 'While it is true that HTML5 video is a step in the right direction, we also have to take into consideration the underlying codecs used to deliver the video content,' says blogger Brian Proffitt. The problem, says Proffitt, is that Microsoft and Apple's browsers will be supporting only the proprietary H.264 video codec by default. But Google supports only the WebM (VP8) and Ogg Theora codecs. 'So, basically, if Ogg Theora content starts making a dent in Apple and Microsoft's bottom line, or that of the MPEG LA's, then expect to see a lawsuit or two headed Google's way after 2015,' concludes Proffitt."
Seriously, MPEG LA is going to create a new pool to try and kill WebM, I'm sure they're already working on it. The question is whether or not we're going to let a bunch of patent trolls control future development of the web. Standardizing around a standard that requires licensing fees is the wrong way to go.
Seriously, who gives a shit? Patents are for lawyers. FFMPEG will play just about anything.
But Google supports only the WebM (VP8) and Ogg Theora codecs.
Wrong. It still plays HTML5 video that is H.264.
TFA does mention Firefox
"But Google (even though it's still listed as a licensee of H.264, right alongside Apple and Microsoft) has opted to avoid the 2016 problem altogether and support only the WebM (VP8) and Ogg Theora codecs, dropping support for H.264. Mozilla has opted for the same codecs for its Firefox browser."
I don't know what it will take to get people straight on this. H.264 is open and is a standard, but patented. WebM isn't a standard, but isn't patented.
They certainly make a lot of noise of how they are forming it and how patent holders have been identified. About a press release every three months, and no concrete facts. The pool has been textbook FUD so far.
The $25-PC Raspberry Pi project is struggling about which codecs to include right. Even at a few bucks or less a codec, that's a huge cost when you try to hit $25 for a functional PC.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
There have been a bunch of posts so far, and none of them were 1, 2, 3, ???, 4 Profitt?!
For shame Slashdot, for shaaaaaaame.
Alright...and now for the grammar Nazis.
Personally, I say bring it. If indeed WebM and/or Ogg Theora are in violation then they need to fix the violation or get out of the video business. The whole premise that this is wrong is based on the notion that patents on software is wrong which is idiotic IMHO.
You'll need to explain that in more detail. Most people that I know who are in the software industry (myself included) take a diametrically-opposed view of software patents.
... patenting the mere idea is another, and that is very wrong.
Furthermore, even if (and it's a big 'if') software patents have any real benefit to anyone but anti-competitive corporate sociopaths such as Apple Computer, the way the law and the United States Patent Office are handling them is an abomination. Inventions are an expression of an idea: patenting the expression is one thing
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Who's implementation of this new standard will define what is considered the standard when people try to conform to the standard? That is to say...who's standard will become the most standard standard?!
Also, there will be plugins/hacks available in no time, officially supported or otherwise.
So what about Konqueror?
^^vv<><>BA
And, hopefully FUD is what it will remain. But, as long as they're unwilling to sign over royalty free use for the h.264 pool, then we need to be using something else. It's not acceptable, IMHO, for standards like this to be pay for play.
The patentability of software is basically flawed and has no place in any knowledge driven economy, but unfortunately this is the reality we're saddled with for the time being.
Nevertheless, I'm getting pretty tired of companies using software patents as a tactical weapon against competition. If I could introduce a single new law, is that any given company's patent claims would have not be valid unless they were exercised at the earliest possible opportunity. No waiting for years until your competition starts threatening your bottom line before you unleash your army of lawyers. Either they would deplete their resources against every single target out there that may or may not be a threat later on, or they would forfeit any claims they might have.
Sure, there would be loopholes, and I can think of a few right now, but it would still be fun to watch.
Kill WebM, extort money for using WebM, it goes the same way ultimately. As long as people are required to pay for the use of the codec, it can't be in Firefox or any other free browser without somebody infringing on the patent. Which is the problem.
I was referring to the patent pool that MPEG LA was trying to put together, although in retrospect that was probably not at all clear.
a standard that requires licensing fees
Only in the US. In places where software patents are a load of hogwash (e.g. europe) h.264 and VP8 are equally open.
The battle between h.264 and Theora has existed for over a year and this article doesn't add any new insight to the table. The OP is full of name dropping and was submitted by someone at IT World but doesn't even throw in a "full disclosure" statement. We get it, Brian Proffitt wrote a stale article for you and your buddy Soulskill hooked you up again...
Patents on software is one thing, patents on standards is quite another thing. It's completely unacceptable for a standard to require a party to license the patent to use the standard. You can sort of get away with it, when it's a standard solely for interacting with a particular software package, but otherwise it's obnoxious and has no place in a standard.
Just look at the headaches with GIF and JPEG, if you don't believe me.
Which works great, as long as you have no intention of ever releasing your website or program on a international level.
Except for the fact that there are already websites and programs that are international that use patented software but don't pay royalties?
Konqueror can handle ogg and webM at the moment.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Actually, GIF wasn't an official "standard", just an image format created by Compuserve and adopted in a bunch of other places.
And JPEG was specifically designed/created to be patent royalty free:
"The JPEG committee has as one of its explicit goals that their standards (in particular their baseline methods) be implementable without payment of license fees, and they have secured appropriate license rights for their upcoming JPEG 2000 standard from over 20 large organizations."
There have been a few lawsuits over patents claimed to be infringed by JPEG, but they were from patent trolls who were ultimately unsuccessful.
But I agree that the way some standards like MPEG, JEDEC, etc. handle patent licensing is ridiculous (though I guess the JEDEC fiasco was mostly due to Rambus' douchy behavior...)
Good luck making sure that no more than 100,000 people receive a copy of your program. That's even fewer people than, say, Jehovah's Witnesses think will go to heaven.
That's only Germany, and the final legality of that declaration is still unclear.
The European Patent Convention clearly excludes computer programs from patentability, as seen in Article 52 (2) c.
However, the European Patent Office has flatly ignored this paragraph, and granted many software patents.
The debate continues.
Why would anyone still use Theora? VP8 is twice as good in terms of compression : quality.
What's the relative computational complexity of decoders for the two formats? I've been told Theora is comparable to MPEG-4 Part 2 (e.g. DivX) and VP8 is comparable to H.264. When trying to play back video on existing hardware, such as a video game console, it helps to know that you can hit the 24 fps target without overheating.
a standard that requires licensing fees
Only in the US. In places where software patents are a load of hogwash (e.g. europe) h.264 and VP8 are equally open.
You're still paying for it when you purchase a gadget with the codec.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Hmm... that sounds like the US: having a law on the books but blatantly ignoring it.
Are they assuming that Mozilla is being stupid enough to kill itself before Firefox hits version 87 (approximately 1 year from now)
I look forward to that. Then when I'm using Firefox 87, and I see someone using IE9 or IE10 (if it's out then), I can tell them they should use Firefox 87 instead. When they ask what's better about it, I can tell them "IE only goes up to 10. Firefox goes up to 87!".
A video codec is about as close to the expression of an idea as you get get without limiting patents to actual machines (and I just have to switch around a gear or something to make my expression different than yours).
Stupid software patents like CSS tricks and one click are bad, but they're bad because they're obvious or trivial, things that are already not supposed to be patentable. Clever, nontrivial or obvious algorithms themselves should be patentable just like a clever chemical process or mechanical process should be patentable. Video codecs fall into the latter category.
Is anybody behind these "free" codecs willing to indemnify the implementers against submarine patents that surface once the codecs gain enough market-share to be worth litigation? There's no way anyone can know if Ogg, Theora, WebM etc are not infringing (or can be alledged to infringing) somebody's IP until it's tested in court. And even then... I note that Apple has been to bat for its developers against patent trolls. Anyone else?
Have you any idea how these pirates work? MPEG-LA is not a charity, its a business with an extremely predatory model. Collect patents together and then try and collect rent from developers.
If WebM needs protection, google will protect it. Nobody is asking MPEG-:LA to pool patents to sieze licencing rights to something they didnt invent (They didn't invent ANYTHING they licence out by the way, MPEG-LA is not MPEG. They just exploit the fact you cant trademark acronyms).
Patent pools are incompatible with free/open source. If someone forces mozilla to licence a patent, guess what only mozilla can use that code and its not free software no more. If parents cover webkit, its not free software no more.
We might well end up with a scenario that the only browsers distributable with linux are those without video.
A world without firefox, VLC , and so on is a world without free access to user created content, and that ultimately is a spike in the heart of free speech.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
derp
Sigh... I'm not very optimistic about the software patent situation. The only bright spot is the very long view. Companies are patenting absolutely anything they can get away with right now. While this poses a problem for short term software development, I wonder if this will have ramifications for long term development. That is... once all the "core technology" patents have expired, they'll be free to use henceforth.
There are likely natural limitations to how much audio or video data can be compressed. Once these patents expire, it will probably occur at a point in time when any incremental advancements in the next codec don't render enough of an advantage given the likely increases in network speeds. I think we've already hit that point with audio encoding - for nearly everyone, mp3 is now good enough and small enough that more sophisticated codecs don't really matter anymore, even if they marginally improve compression/quality ratios.
Scant comfort, I know, as 17 years is a hell of a long time to wait for things to be freed up. Still, it's nice to know these companies won't have an eternal lock on these methods.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If you want to 'take the moral high ground' to the extreme, then you just have to recognize that there are going to be plenty of times when you don't get your way because no one else cares about your irrational response to what you perceive as a problem in the natural order of things.
This will not be one of those times. Also, you're wrong about everything else, particularly your attempts to redefine open and paint anyone who disagrees with you as a cult member. You're delusional if you think you're litany changes the fact that software patents are the opposite of open.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Absolutely. I own a software and hardware dev company. We are firmly opossed to software patents. I find the idea laughable. I know competition will try to implement the features I include, and I'll do the same. That drives innovation, and helps create both formal and ad-hoc standards. Whenever I include a feature that noone has included before, I try to make as complete as possible, and we start working on an update right on release date, knowing I still have to compete We don't own a single patent, and we develop both proprietary and GPL products. We have earned a nice marketshare playing fair, we give our customers free updates for life, and we free most of our code. If you want to play fair, you don't need no stinking patents.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
|| Patent pools are incompatible with free/open source.
|I'm sorry, thats flat out false is most ways.
Actually its very true.
You, mine friend, need to learn how patent pools work and how it stops anyone from freely distribute the code using GPL.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html
Given that GPL is the most used license for open source software - patent pools are very bad.
Just saying it like it are.
I don't know where you get this impression, as the MPEG-LA isn't really even "free as in beer".... or at least you need to check their licenses out a little better before you make such statements.
The problem is that the royalties are sent downstream, and represent barriers to entry in the form that developers of products have a minimum price they must sell software or devices simply due to how the licensing scheme is set up. It is also a protection racket where content authors or even patent holders (in the case of MPEG-LA royalties) almost never get anything from the money collected. Most of it goes into the overhead of simply operating the MPEG-LA.
If you are selling a high-end audio editing software suite or a commercial MP3 player, the royalty payments for the MPEG-LA really are inconsequential.... but they aren't free.
Most significantly, their licensing terms are completely incompatible with something like an "open source" software project, particularly with the GPL. It isn't so much that the GPL or "open source" licenses are explicitly prohibited, but that the royalty collection system simply isn't in place for that kind of software or product. Even building an MP3 player or a hand-held computer with video playback with an Arduino home-brew kit where you publish the source code and schematics is incompatible with anything under the terms of the MPEG-LA.
Simply put, you can't call that an "open license" other than it doesn't discriminate against multi-national companies wishing to produce commercial products using formats claimed under licenses offered by the MPEG-LA. They are no different than ASCAP, but then again I'm not a big fan of that organization either.
Perhaps you might be correct here.... so far as the ideas expressed in a patentable video codec would need to be rather narrow in definition where the patent really only covers the specific approach used with a particular codec.
Sadly, particularly with software patents, they are typically interpreted very broadly where you are being held liable for infringement merely because you wrote a single line of code.... in whatever language you are writing that software.
If you could write some software completely from scratch without having seen the work of somebody else, I don't think you should even be capable of infringing somebody's patent. Sadly, I think most programmers at the moment unintentionally violate several patents, often on a daily basis, merely because they can't constantly search the USPTO website to make sure they aren't infringing on somebody's patent. Where is the justice in that?
The issue with GIF wasn't even Compuserve, but rather some patent trolls at Unisys who discovered that they held a patent on the LZW compression algorithm. Unisys went to Compuserve with a legal threat, but also a licensing scheme where they and their customers could be absolved of past and future infringement if they would submit to the license.... and they capitulated.
In fairness to Compuserve, the developers who created the GIF standard intended it to be patent and royalty free. Their mistake was picking up an ACM Journal and discovering the LZW algorithm when they were trying to establish the format, thus adopting that algorithm into the standard. Typically at the time, algorithms published in such a manner were considered "in the public domain"... or at least assumed so if you were formally publishing how they were working in an internationally recognized journal of that nature. Certainly in the article where this algorithm appeared there was no mention of intellectual property other than a copyright on the article itself. Software patents were presumed to be something you would do to something that you also protected via trade secrets and deliberately tried to keep from your competitors except for a begrudging filing with the USPTO that was usually obfuscated enough that you couldn't really figure the algorithm out from the patent application anyway.
It should be noted that IBM also seemed to have a patent on LZW algorithm, so the claim by Unisys could have been challenged from multiple fronts. The problem was that nobody wanted to take them on so it was either ignored or people capitulated to Unisys.
The largest problem with the GIF format was the issue that web browsers had adopted the GIF standard as a de facto image standard and the only universal image format across multiple operating systems and browsers that displayed images. JPEG images were starting to come into use, but there are limitations on JPEG images and it wasn't nearly so universal. Furthermore, most image editing software at the time Unisys started to demand royalty payments supported the GIF standard.... in part because it was thought to be patent and royalty free.
This stands out because it was one of the first software patents that really impacted a broad swath of software developers and pretty much hit nearly every internet user at about the same time. Few companies are willing to let such "submarine patents" languish without enforcement any more because too much money can be made through enforcement before the concept becomes essentially an international standard. Unisys got lucky after a fashion too, as they certainly didn't contribute to the development of the GIF standard.
In terms of "official standard", I guess that is in the eye of the beholder. I do believe that the W3C did archive the GIF standard and provided links to Compuseve's documents on the format as a recommended image format for web browsers before the patent issue hit the fan. It certainly was hard to avoid the use of GIFs even if you tried, and was a pretty universal image format even before web browsers were created.
Is anybody behind those standard codecs willing to indemnify the implementers against submarine patents that surface once the codecs gain enough market-share to be worth litigation?
In terms of "official standard", I guess that is in the eye of the beholder. I do believe that the W3C did archive the GIF standard and provided links to Compuseve's documents on the format as a recommended image format for web browsers before the patent issue hit the fan. It certainly was hard to avoid the use of GIFs even if you tried, and was a pretty universal image format even before web browsers were created.
Yep, everything you say is true, of course - I was just pointing out that neither GIF nor JPEG was really an example of a standards body intentionally expecting implementors to pay licensing fees. JPEG in fact tried to avoid it and was hit by trolls, and GIF was just one of those de facto standards in the early days of the Internet that was also hit by a troll.
IMO it would be interesting to see if there could be some sort of government registration of "standards" that requires a review and formal submission process/timeline for any potential infringing patents, after which it is officially declared patent-free and open for implementation by anyone. Seems like that would go a long way towards preventing patent trolls like this...
If you don't want to worry about patents, stick with MPEG-1 video. It does a pretty good job, both software and hardware implementations are ubiquitous, and you have test data of almost anything you would like.
Ogg Theora is nearly as old as Ogg Vorbis, although its adoption has been much slower in part because MPEG-1 has been available to fill in any niche application that might have used it.
Yes, compression on MPEG-1 stinks compared to some of the newer codecs. That is what you pay for with the new fangled formats. Also.... don't buy into the BS that you can't have 1080p video with MPEG1, as you most certainly can. The difference is strictly the compression levels... and possibly an implementation which can handle that much data.
At the very least, if courts recognized standards bodies and invalidated patents not disclosed for standards widely published after a certain period of time, I think that would go a long way in terms of stopping trolls. Part of the problem with a patent is that you don't have to enforce it like you do with trademarks and copyright. With copyright, if you ignore enforcement.... the infringement is held to be legal. With patent law, you can file a lawsuit decades after infringement and even seek compensation for infringement in the past.
In the case of the GIF format, had Unisys been up front about the fact they held the patent, most people would have either dealt with the licensing or not used the format but would have done so with knowledge of what they were doing. It might have even pushed the development of the PNG format to a much earlier time frame. Disclosure is the key, and the problem was that disclosure didn't happen.
Unisys did contemplate the idea of going after previous infringement, as technically the law permitted them to essentially "own the internet" and demand billions of dollars from nearly every internet user. They risked the potential, however, of somebody willing to stand up to such a tactic and invalidating the patent altogether.... so they chose instead the path of least resistance. Their licensing terms were screwy at best, and I did try to negotiate a license with them at one point in my professional career explicitly for a product that used GIF images. I ended up telling Unisys to get lost after they came back with a counter-offer.
i understand it is mpeg la's ip. some hardware/software is licensed to decode it. other hardware/software is licensed to encode it. how is it different than every other codec?
...
Oh, the situation with MPEG-LA is worse than that. If you capture video on any kind of MPEG camera, even high-end "professional" models, you've now got a video that is encumbered and you can't use it for ANY commercial purpose without a license from MPEG-LA.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The Patent Pool isn't to kill WebM, it is to protect those who choose to use WebM from litigation.
Spit that cool aid out fast! They cannot possibly protect from litigation, only accept payments to not litigate themselves. Anyone who chooses not to toss their patent into the pool can still crawl out from the woodwork at any time (for mpeg, vp8, or anything else).
MPEG-LA's pool has one purpose and one purpose only. It is a desperate search for anything they can use to screw people who choose to avoid their fees on mpeg and h.264.
There are two codecs out there (theora and vp8) that are freely licensed and that pisses them off. Keep in mind that when MPEG-LA claims all codecs are covered by patents, it's a combination of propaganda and wishful thinking on their part. They have so far failed to produce one that covers theora or VP8 (and they have certainly been looking). Their stated mission is to find a way to poison the well so they can sell bottled water.
Videopress, the video hosting arm of Wordpress, offers main video encoding in h.264 & also an Ogg Theora view or download option, both are available.
If you have a free Wordpress.com blog, you can buy Videopress & once you've uploaded your video to the Wordpress Blog, play the stream in any other web site with a Flash player. Gets around the Youtube 15 minute limitation as well.
Nico M, London, GB.
The Patent Pool isn't to kill WebM, it is to protect those who choose to use WebM from litigation.
Sure, but protection from whom? From themselves perhaps?
'The president of the FFII has brought to people’s attention this good report from The Prior Art blog, saying that “MPEG-LA’s CEO Larry Horn also heads MobileMedia, a patent troll holding no less than 122 patents bought to Nokia and Sony” '
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Normally this situation is pretty cut and dry. Unfortunately, the problem here is that H.264 is substantially better technology than WebM, it's not clear that WebM is not trampling on MPEG-LA patents, Google is not indemnifying WebM users against it, and Ogg Theora is noticeably worse than WebM.
I am obviously in favor of eliminating software patents, and thereby eliminating the problem of patent trolls like MPEG-LA. I am also obviously in favor of open standards. But this is not like most software where we can just round up some of the gang and knock out a new better thing in a few weeks. There are not a lot of people who can design a modern, performant, high-quality video codec, open source or no (notably, both Google and Xiph have managed to do a shitty job). To do so within our legal constraints really might be asking too much.
Since it looks like we don't get to live in the world we want to live in, we have to ask ourselves which of the worlds we can have we would like. I don't relish the idea of having inferior technology foisted on me any more than the idea of closed standards. But it's looking like we're going to have to pick one, and I don't think when it comes down to it I'd rather have the inferior technology.
I can tell them they should use Firefox 87 instead.
And then they'll ask, "what, like, from 1987?".
Bad idea. ~
As long as people are required to pay for the use of the codec, it can't be in Firefox or any other free browser without somebody infringing on the patent. Which is the problem.
Video shouldn't have to be in the browser. Every modern OS has a perfectly usable media framework for apps to use and in the vast majority of cases it already contains an H264 codec or permits one to be obtained.
On the other hand from a practical point of view, if you don't actually sell your software (e.g, it is distributed freely like say libx264), you are likely under the radar regardless of how many copies you don't sell
Even for a product comparable to, say, Winamp?
According to the HTML5 test page, Safari (on OS X) supports WebM as well as H.264.
This may be different on iOS of course, due to decoding issues.
Decoding a compressed JPEG image took a non-trivial amount of CPU power back then, too. Put 20 of them on a web page and watch your computer grind to a halt decompressing them.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Even in that case, given that IE uses DirectShow for HTML5 video, you'd just need to install a WebM or Theora DirectShow filter (like ffmpeg) and it would work in IE.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
Yea, gifs are totally dead.
senorgif.com
sig not found
Yea, that last line about "outdated results" really beefs up your point, there.
sig not found
So given all my media is already in h.264 when it comes off the device, what's the rationale behind getting it in webM/vp8 without any proprietary license? Never mind that h.264 is technically superior and has hardware support in all my devices, and webM is open to being shafted due to patent infringement...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Thankfully, out judges and politicians are still learning this Art.
If you don't want to use Mozilla, you are free to use another browser, without any averse effect. But if H.264 becomes the standard video on the Web, you cannot just choose another format. Providers can't because people likely will not have that other codec installed, and possibly cannot even install it. Users cannot, because if a video is H.264, there's no way to watch it except with a H.264 codec. You cannot even write your own H.264 codec without a license, because unlike copyright, patents also cover clean-room reimplementations.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's not trivial to write a working, modern video codec without using techniques other people have invented, and the patents on those techniques are fairly specific. The parts that aren't fall under "obvious." Again, "software patents" is too broad a category - there are good patents on algorithms and poor, overly broad patents on non-software. I do agree that a better patent search mechanism would be a good idea though. On the other hand, the algorithms that are protected by good patents tend to come with a clear warning in books.
I remember when I was doing some graphics work, VTK came with a marching cubes filter with a warnings stamped all over the documentation that it was patented.
Apart from Microsoft there is no one who offers indemnification, not Apple (they offered to pay legal fees in the Lodsys case, which is something entirely different) and certainly not MPEG-LA ... a WebM developer is as safe from litigation as a H.264 developer in the end, in both cases they are protected by the commercial interest of the parties behind the standards without any outright guarantees.
As for whether it's clear that WebM is not trampling in MPEG-LA patents ... over a year without a single patent number being mentioned is clear enough for me.
All the MPEG-LA members are too chickenshit to commit their patents. There is nothing for WebM to fix, since no patent number has ever been mentioned.
The MPEG-LA members know better than most that patent litigation is a complete fucking crapshoot, everything is far too interconnected for any real judgement to be made ... it all comes down to whether the scribbles on a piece of paper from a random bunch of inbreds in Texas looks more like guilty or not guilty. They are riding the gravy train with the patent pool and they aren't going to jeopardize that in litigation against Google.
Perfect solution: ignore the USA
In order to ignore the USA, I'd first have to leave the USA. Which country do you recommend, and how should I qualify for lawful resident status?
It'd actually be very surprising if WebM did infringe any MPEG-LA patents; it was carefully designed to avoid doing so, and this shouldn't be that hard to do because a lot of the patents in question are very narrow. The reason they're so narrow is that because of the MPEG standards body's stance of patent-neutrality, the original patent holder can submit technologies to the standard that infringe on their patents and the MPEG Group won't modify them to work around the patents no matter how trivial it is to do so. Narrow patents are more easily defended against prior art, hence most of them are just broad enough to catch all standards-compliant implementations.
3 things :
1) linux doesn't (well, not a legal one anyway). It's not free.
2) neither does windows xp
3) even in the cases where such is provided, they're like all other "standard" implementations : incompatible
In fairness ... you might list the full steps from the MPEG-LA's business plans. It goes like this :
1) bring together experts, implementors (on their payroll), testers, ..., and negotiate for years with all sorts of different companies and government agencies until you have enough investment to get a quality video compression format
2) publish all the products of step 1 openly, for everyone to read and use. Write books about it (yes, plural, we're talking dozens)
3) profit
Step 3, the "predatory" part, is kind of a necessity for this whole thing to work ... And you could just as well argue that people using this product without compensating MPEG-LA is just as predatory. H264 is something that you don't write in an afternoon (or with 100 developers in a year's time, for that matter).
MPEG-LA did invest kind of a huge amount of money to create h264 in the first place. WebM, is partly based on that work. Work which was shared, but not freely shared. See here for example, note what software is used for WebM decoding : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8#Encoding.
So what's the big deal here ? MPEG-LA advanced the state of the art in compression codecs, by a lot, and they invested money in that project. How is it unfair of them to expect compensation from people using that work, whether that is through using WebM or h264 ?
Anyway, the point is moot, since anything that needs video codecs still needs h264. Only when that changes (which won't be until blue-ray is forgotten in the dustbin of history) will there be a problem : if you buy a license for your software to decode h264, you're perfectly welcome to use that same license for WebM as far as MPEG-LA is concerned.
God, how utterly shocking: the only winners from a new technology are lawyers. My world will go half deaf from being thus turned onto its ear.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
They are riding the gravy train with the patent pool and they aren't going to jeopardize that in litigation against Google.
Yes. It would be a damned shame if Google got some of those oh-so-valuable patents invalidated. I'd really like them to go after IBM: the Nazgûl would take them down a notch or two.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Is the MPEG-LA willing to indemnify H.264 licensees against non-MPEG-LA submarine patents that surface? No. So why the double-standards?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Given that GPL is the most used license for open source software
Most OSS uses some sort of BSD-style license.
The SCOTUS already provided the details, we can only react to those realities in one way or another.
You don't have to understand the weather to look outside the door and choose good boots.
2. DiVX amongst others offers a H264 codec for nothing. Perhaps if demand for a Linux codec were so great they'd even supply one of those.
3. There are very precise definitions of what H264 should do at various profiles and levels. If a particular codec didn't meet those requirements it could be blacklisted.
I have no objection to VP8 being the "default" codec but to artificially deny other codecs even when they're sitting right there in the OS is absurd. Especially H264 which is the defacto format for hardware devices and will continue to be regardless of VP8 or not.
It's also not clear that H.264 is not trampling on Goole (On2) patents and MPEG-LA is not idemnifying MPEG-LA licensees against it (or anyone else) either. So what's your point?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
It's like the old days where gif died cause cmpuserve owned it
It wasn't Compuserve that caused all the hate and discontent. It was Unisys that was making threats and trying to get royalties. Compuserve didn't sue anybody, didn't demand anything from anyone. In fact, I believe they were Unisys' first target.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Are any of the people you know in the software industry over the age of 25? Most entry level programmers don't like software patents, but that is only because they themselves aren't trying to make, sell, and distribute something they have written themselves. When the shoe changes feet and they develop something new and innovative, and then when a multi-billion dollar company steals the idea, hires a team of programmers and re-creates it, and then starts putting improvements on it 10 times quicker than you can ever hope to, they will quickly scream bloody murder and how the government needs to do something to prevent this.
Are any of the people you know in the software industry over the age of 25?
All of them. I'm over fifty myself. And why is it the government's job to provide such protection?
... patently ridiculous. Arguably even more batshit insane than universities and corporations that are patenting genes. Genes.
The reason that we look at software patents as a bad thing is that we do care about our work, and what we don't want is some big team of lawyers telling us that we can't use or improve algorithms in order to make our products better. The software industry moves at warp speed compared to just about any other: assigning patent protection to algorithms (or at best, the expression of same in code) serves no valid purpose. In any event, how you look at this depends entirely upon what you believe the purpose of software patent protection to be: the advancement of the useful arts and sciences, or the suppression of progress in order to maintain the revenue streams of a comparatively few large patent holders. You decide.
This particular issue, that of codecs, is a perfect example. There's tons of money to be made in this business by every legitimate entity involved regardless of patent protection. The only real beneficiaries here are companies that simply don't want to be bothered by someone outside their little cabalistic group coming up with something better, even though in the long run they too would benefit from such progress.
Granted, much of the debate here centers as much upon the unbelievably poor handling of software patents (indeed, patents in general) by Congress and the United States Patent Office as it does upon the mere existence of this class of patents. Nevertheless, anyone who is concerned about the long-term health of the profession of developer, and the advancement of the state of this particular art, should be very concerned about software patents. You can say what you like about how software needs the dubious "protection" of patents, but the reality is that this industry has not only survived but thrived for decades with nothing but the substantial defenses afforded by copyright. Copyright your work, sue if your rights are infringed by illegal distribution, obfuscate your executables if necessary to maintain your trade secrets. There are plenty of effective ways to protect your intellectual assets, especially in the age of Web applications where your oh-so-valuable code need not reside on the customer's equipment, making reverse engineering impossible. On the other hand, telling me that I can't use a particular mathematical expression in my code is, well
It's pretty clear at this point that software patents are little more than a blunt instrument used by the big boys to suppress potential competition, and trolls to extort money from the organizations they parasitize. They simply don't have much benefit to the little guy, in practical terms: unless you happen to have accumulated a substantial number of relevant patents for defensive purposes and have a correspondingly hefty legal budget, the big boys will do what they want with your world-changing patented "idea". Sure, you can take them to court and try for some degree of redress, but that's a massively expensive undertaking. In the meantime, if your algorithm is truly valuable, they'll be making millions from it. If you're a small developer or startup, depending upon the law to protect your assets is a mistake as it simply does not work in your favor. The odds of winning a patent lawsuit generally work like this (no. of relevant patents x size of legal department) + (relative innumeracy of the judge and jury.)
The Founders perspective (very clearly expressed in the Constitution) was that the ultimate beneficiary of what we now know as "intellectual property" was to be We the People, and that both patents and copyright were, ultimately, to benefit the public domain. So yes, I understand your point: nobod
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The SCOTUS already provided the details, we can only react to those realities in one way or another.
You don't have to understand the weather to look outside the door and choose good boots.
Congress still has the power to change matters. They have no particular incentive to do so, but they could. Theoretically.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Many tools for the same job. Blocked here, circumvent there, get everywhere you want to go. Outta my way, only-one-way-to-do-things developers. On the web, I'm in charge.
The guy who asked maybe? Idiot.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Indeed, the arguments against open source browsers using system frameworks or codecs for non-free formats just don't hold water. I feel the main reason Mozilla refuses to allow this is politically motivated. Same for Google, although they're pushing their own format. Neither of them want to see H.264 or any other commercial format become the de-facto standard because the folks at Mozilla don't believe people have the right to choose non-free software and the folks at Google want the world to use their shit. I love H.264 because it gives me awesome quality in small files and it "just works" across a myriad of my devices. My iPad cannot play VP8 or Theora and VLC on my Macs don't play OGG files very well. Hell I even tried using VLC on my jailbroken iPad. If VP8 or another "free" format had the hardware and software support of H.264 then I would have no problem using it.
1) please look up how valid the FAT patent was in Europe : perfectly valid. For most non-Chinese Asian countries software patents are valid and China is just a matter of time (problem is enforcement, not so much the law) ... which requires you, amongst other things, to never use any other player than their own, if you think that's a better deal, go ahead
2) I believe DiVX has a proper license, and to get their implementation you have to agree to their EULA
You might have mentioned flash as well, since that's at least a workable solution for websites
3) if that were true every implementation except the win7 and ffmpeg one should be blacklisted (specifically the divx one). Browser makers don't like to have bugs "this video works on win2k, but not on winxp" type bugs which are unavoidable when using the OS's codecs. It also adds complexity to the user's experience because they will need to track down the correct codec for their own system. Google is pretty adamant about avoiding that (and their browser is much better for it)
And your point of view is on how terrible it may be that you can't implement something that someone has already done into your own applications. I'm on the other end of the balance. My projects are typically innovative. They aren't copies of something that someone else has done before, so I'm more afraid of a large company stealing my ideas and profiting from them than I am of whether I can or can't steal the ideas someone else had.
That doesn't mean I'm in total agreement with how software patents have been granted in the past. They are typically too broad (See i4i vs Microsoft), too general, and for things that are rarely innovative (See "click once"), or a simple repacking of one idea+some new medium=new patent.
As for the software patents being a blunt instrument used by the big boys.. I guess I'm in a special situation. I'm not big, but if a large company did decide to try and steal one of my ideas, I could quickly raise the capital to fend them off if necessary, but then again, I'm easily bought off if they present a large enough check. I'm not out to rule the world, just earn enough to keep food on the table, a roof over my head, and a slew of sports cars parked in my garage.
2) From the DivX website - "The DivX Plus® Codec Pack includes everything you need to play DivX® or MKV files in third-party applications, like Windows Media Player.". Or in a web browser assuming the browser bothered to use what was available to it.
3) The fact is that a browser could maintain a whitelist / blacklist of codecs and if any particular codec vendor wished to extricate themselves from a blacklist, or get onto the whitelist the browser vendor could provide a mechanism to do it. Heck, the browser could one step further and treat a video tag as a specialized NPAPI plugin that declares what containers & codecs it supported and implementing a particular scripting API and callback. Supply the VP8 plugin with the browser and then let the vendors implement additional video plugins in any way they saw fit.
The fact is that browser have chosen to artificially limit the usefulness of video tag and it sucks.
Bzzz. Wrong. MPEG-LA demands license fees from anyone in Europe too.
Mozilla can pay for the license out of their $100M annual revenue; they just don't want to. Free software martyrdom is a choice; it's not some law of nature.
I agree that it is good that patents will expire. That said, they last longer than 17 years in the US (and in plenty of other countries they last 20 years). But it will be awhile before they are finished. For example MP3 (and MPEG-1 that MP3 is a part of) will not be done till at least 2015 (and the draft standard came out in 1991), MPEG-2 is at least 2018 and H.264 is 2027. By that time, there will probably be some 3D video codec that everyone wants, so we still will have to deal with software patents.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264
Ah, but that is why software patents are even more insidious than copyright restrictions; you can infringe a software patent without even being aware of doing it. A clean-room implementation does nothing to solve this.