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Google and MPEG LA Reach VP8 Patent Agreement
First time accepted submitter Curupira writes "The official WebM blog announced that MPEG LA has licensed all VP8 essential patents to Google Inc., allowing the company to sublicense the described techniques it to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis." TechCrunch offers a bit more analysis.
Score one for freedom
isn't going to like this. Google watch out for a horse's head in your bed.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
TFA indicates that MS was only holding back on WebRTC (which uses VP8) because of patent concerns, so they may now move forward on it.
That seems to defy history. MS drags its feet and tries to undercut every new web tech it can. That's just MS - their strength is the desktop and they see the web and the Internet in general as a threat.
I can well believe that MS said that patents were the reason, but making random excuses for why they won't support a web tech - and then creating new ones as necessary - is just how MS operates when it comes to the web and open standards.
The dream is dead.
In some future scenario when Google stops paying the licensing fees, what happens to the (developers/users/businesses/etc) who are using/developing with VP8/9/10/*/etc. Are these entities going to now be at risk?
Pretty good timing for Renesas.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2253238/renesas-announces-low-latency-vp8-hardware-encoder
I would be absolutely amazed if Google can deliver a competitive codec before HEVC/H.265 becomes entrenched.
H.264's great strength is that it reaches far beyond the web.
Theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Home video. Industrial applications and so on. WebM is for all practical purposes a transcode for YouTube and that in the end is simply not enough.
Closely connected, Google has proposed that ISO/MPEG standardize VP8 in its royalty-free Internet Video Coding activity. http://www.robglidden.com/2013/03/google-mpegla-vp8-mpeg-proposal/
âoeThis is a significant milestone in Googleâ(TM)s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,â said Allen Lo, Googleâ(TM)s deputy general counsel for patents. âoeWe appreciate MPEG LAâ(TM)s cooperation in making this happen.â
âoeWe are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users,â said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn.
I LOLed.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Simple: Using x264 doesn't protect, limit you from patent litigation. If you now deliver VP8 content over the internet, or support it in your browser, you aren't going to get sued into the ground by MPEG-LA. Google licensed it for royalty-free use by others.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
.. which patents MPEG LA were claiming to be essential?
Google is already an MPEG-LA licensor so it doesn't matter (to them) if VP8 infringes on those patents.
Simple: Using x264 doesn't protect, limit you from patent litigation. If you now deliver VP8 content over the internet, or support it in your browser, you aren't going to get sued into the ground by MPEG-LA. Google licensed it for royalty-free use by others.
Near as I can tell, Google hasn't gone that far yet-- Google licensed it from MPEG-LA with the option of being able to offer royalty-free licenses to VP8 users. How much you'll have to pay Google for the royalty-free license, or whether Google will subsidize the cost for all VP8 users has not yet been announced, as far as I can tell from TFA.
And the scare tactics for x264 are getting a little old, don't you think?
E pluribus unum
How much you'll have to pay Google for the royalty-free license, or whether Google will subsidize the cost for all VP8 users has not yet been announced, as far as I can tell from TFA.
Am I fundamentally misunderstanding some terminology here? It seems to me that a royalty-free licence is, by definition, free as in beer. Isn't that what royalty-free means?
No, it means "not charged per use". You can be charged an upfront fee for a royalty-free license.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
If you now deliver VP8 content over the internet, or support it in your browser, you aren't going to get sued into the ground by MPEG-LA
But the quality of the codec still matters. Hardware support still matters.
If H.265 delivers on its promises, distributing video at all resolutions is going to become dramatically less expensive.
It seems to me that a royalty-free licence is, by definition, free as in beer. Isn't that what royalty-free means?
No, royalty-free means free of the requirement to pay royalties, not that the license is free.
From a technical standpoint VP8 doesn't do anything significantly better than h.264, and isn't as good as h.264 in a number of ways. The only real advantage it ostensibly possessed was its licensing terms... and most people simply don't care about that.
#DeleteChrome
I'll add my own thoughts here, also posted at http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/59893.html
"After a decade of the MPEG LA saying they were coming to destroy the FOSS codec movement, with none other than the late Steve Jobs himself chiming in, today the Licensing Authority announced what we already knew.
They got nothing. There will be no Theora patent pool. There will be no VP8 patent pool. There will be no VPnext patent pool.
We knew that of course, we always did. It's just that I never, in a million years, expected them to put it in writing and walk away. The wording suggests Google paid some money to grease this along, and the agreement wording is interesting [and instructive] but make no mistake: Google won. Full stop.
This is not an unconditional win for FOSS, of course, the LA narrowed the scope of the agreement as much as they could in return for agreeing to stop being a pissy, anti-competetive brat. But this is still huge. We can work with this.
For at least the immediate future, I shall have to think some uncharacteristically nice things about the MPEG LA.*
*Apologies to Rep. Barney Frank"
The MPEG-LA license pools don't offer non-standard restricted licenses ... Google being a licensor for say the AVC pool wouldn't give them any rights for VP8.
Hardware support for H264/H265/etc is done with firmware and some very VERY basic routines in hardware that are not patent encumbered any more since they are so old and basic to even the idea of video compression.
That means that the hardware that currently supports H264 will be upgraded to support H265 by the same method that it will (or could, but won't in the case of Apple products) be upgraded to VP8. Firmware update.
How does this affect the Theora and Vorbis formats ..
AccountKiller
MPEGLA Is a horribly managed scam, bereft of any ethics whatsoever... They will settle any suit to keep their company financials out of the court system can't let the public know how much money they make...
Ah! Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld
I can't decide if Google is now just craven or cowardly.
nobody in their right mind will trust google in ten years. They make all their money by mining your private data and showing you advertisements.... do no evil, almost they're entire income is evil.
Its hilarious if you search for this story on the net, you find headlines on both sides of the spectrum. One side, like on slashdot.org (google fanbois), just a side note saying they reached a licensing agreement. Now if you find the story on some different places of the net, you see things like "Google admits its VP8/WebM codec infringes MPEG H.264 patents", nice google, very nice...
Google ships GPL'd implementations of this codec. If a codec is GPL'd and you have the RIGHT to give people a license to some required patent then the GPL says you implicitly give them and all subsequent downstream recipients such a license.
"Scare tactics" for H.264 implementations are doubtless as "old" as the worries about the lack of lifeboats for passenger carrying vessels at the start of the 20th century. The Titanic is unsinkable right? I mean, until it sinks.
Of course, since the illegality was stealing the patented work of other Codecs
Of course, the actually illegality was awarding invalid patents on mathematics for MPEG codecs.
Google could probably have got them all invalidated - eventually, at great cost. MPEG-LA knew this, did not want its bogus patents invalidated but knew Google did not want years of court room battles, so the face-saver was to license the bogus patents, probably for a token $1 or similar.
BTW Anyone who talks of 'stealing' patented technology is a shill or a moron or both. You *infringe* patents, it's a civil matter.
However, it does protect Theora.
No it doesn't actually!
It is curious, but Google let MPEG-LA slip a semi-open threat for theora (and VP6, but who cares about that) into the press release, which was no doubt carefuly crafted to suit the wishes of both companies (Google no doubt the "may infringe" in there).
"The agreements also grant Google the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec." --- here they say that the licensing only covers VP8 and VP9 (no word on if VP9 is onyl covered for VP8 techniques, or new VP9 techniques that infringe additional IP, too. We shall see in the future hopefully.)
"entered into agreements granting Google a license to techniques that may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders" --- here they say that the patents are perhaps relevant not onyl to VP8, but to earlier On2 codecs: VP3, VP4, VP5, VP6, VP7. Theora as you might know is based on VP3. In other words, this press release FUDs Theora, implying that those patents might be used against it.
Well, nobody cares about Theora anymore and it isn't widely used with attention shifting to VP8 (including Xiph sadly - where is that Ptalarbvorm - Theora 1.2 release that was supposed to come in 2010?). That means that Theora users are luckily safe, most likely.
Develop a sense of humor, you fucking Philistine.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Uh, the agreement covers the earlier codecs too. Read it again.
Uh, the agreement covers the earlier codecs too. Read it again.
Where? Read the first quote, it says that a right is given to google to sublicense those patents to any user of VP8 or VP9.
Even if the second quote meant that Google gets license even for Theora (it is vague, so that is not out of question), the first quote means that no user of Theora gets the license for it from Google. Because Theora is not VP8 or VP9. And that is what matters...