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.

Comments

the Hollywood mafia

[ozduo]

isn't going to like this. Google watch out for a horse's head in your bed.

So MS may now back WebRTC???

[Qwavel]

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.

Re:So MS may now back WebRTC???

[DragonWriter]

Google lies about patent coverage for VP8 (which places people who buy into it at serious risk), admits to their lies by finally licensing patents

Executing a blanket license to any and all patents that members of the MPEG LA may or may not hold that turn out to be essential to implementing either VP8 or VP9 (which isn't even specified yet, so that's pretty much a blank check from MPEG LA) is not admitting that VP8 is patent-encumbered. Its just an indication that the value to Google of eliminating, for potential users, the uncertainty raised by MPEG LA over VP8's status, plus the value to Google of assuring that MPEG LA can't do the same thing with VP9, is greater than the cost of paying off MPEG LA.

Re:So MS may now back WebRTC???

[ozmanjusri]

but that doesn't matter either because microsoft is evil.

Well spotted.

As a participant in WebRTC, Microsoft had the opportunity to improve that standard. As the developer of the protocol, they had the opportunity to make CU-RTC-Web genuinely platform agnostic. Instead they chose to preserve their ability to Balkanise VOIP communications, and ensure their platform(s) could be advantaged for the foreseeable future.

Their decision to be evil is what makes it dangerous to adopt their suggestion as a standard.

Re:Remember when Google said WebM was patent-free?

[jockm]

They never said it was patent free, they said that they held all the patents (and licensed them royalty free) and that it didn't infringe on any others.

What they didn't do was indemnify people using WebM from litigation. MPEG-LA said they had a portfolio of patents that covered WebM, and said that they would indemnify... for a price.

So what Google has done is to cross-license parts of their own portfolio to ensure that people can use WebM for free and with (little) threat of litigation.

While most of use want to get rid of software and process patents, that isn't going to happen in the short term. Google did a good thing here...

Re:Woo hoo

[MightyMartian]

Yes, so in reality, this is actually still counted against freedom. This is fundamentally no different than allowing someone to patent Pi, and then someone and paying for a license so all their customers don't have to pay to calculate the properties of circles.

Re:VP8 is terrible

[aztracker1]

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.

Re:Remember when Google said WebM was patent-free?

[fustakrakich]

Google did a good thing here...

By kicking the can further down the road? I don't think so. It only delays resolution of the matter, and in no way deters the need to abolish patents and copyright.

Re:Remember when Google said WebM was patent-free?

[tlhIngan]

These days, if a big patent holder in a related field (e.g. MPEG-LA) says they are going to gather all their patents and attack you, then they can do serious damage regardless of what any experts might say about actual infringement.

A company deciding to license patents that it believes it hasn't infringed it pretty common-place unfortunately.

MPEG-LA isn't a patent holder. They are a licensing authority

What happens is all the patent holders of various standards like h.264 got together, negotiated a fee schedule and split up the payments such that if you wanted to license everything related to h.264, you basically paid a fee per device or implementation. That licensed you all the patents you need (they're FRAND).

It's a little better than what we have in 3GPP which results in having to license patents from individual patent holders - if you need to negotiate with 10 or 20 or 50 of them, your legal feels rise substantially versus just go and paying the fixed fee.

All Google did here was negotiate with all the patent holders together through the MPEG-LA. So now as long as you paid the fee, (or in this case, it's royalty free), no patent holder in the pool can go after you for that implementation (if you didn't pay for h.264, you can be sued for that, even if the patent was granted for VP8 - it's only valid for VP8 and not for technologies related).

Re:Google also proposed ISO/MPEG standardize VP8

[slew]

It's a bit more complicated than that...

For those not familar with what is going on in the video compression standards group, there were 2 independent efforts: HEVC (the so-called high-efficiency video codec to update H.264) and the IVC (internet video codec). IVC was not meant to replace HEVC, but be optimized for internet applications. Many folks seem to be confusing these in their responses.

One of the goals for IVC was for it to acheive so-called "type-1" licensing (basically free-as-in-beer) which would require all those that contribute to the standard to freely licence their patents. Of course the ISO/IEC groups that standardize this stuff (aka the MPEG group) cannot assure that the standard is free of patents, but only that no contributor to the standard will charge for the use of their patents in conjunction with the use of the standard.

The original baseline for IVC was a stripped down version of MPEG2 (basically MPEG1++ or MPEG2-- depending on your point of view) that was thought to be unencumbered by patents (MPEG1 is really old and some of the patents that cover it are even older and expired). Google submitted their VP8 for consideration for IVC. Needless to say, the ITM (IVC Test Model used to experiment with IVC) didn't perform very well relative to the more modern VP8 in recent comparison tests in Bit-Distortion modeling.

I would venture to guess that Google decided that it needed to clear the air with MPEG-LA (not related to ISO/IEC, but a separate patent-pool/licensing company created by the owners of the patents of original MPEG standard and some other corporations) so that it did not hinder its proposal for being considered as the baseline IVC codec for the test model.

Lest folks think that current VP8 is going to get through unscathed by the MPEG group, I believe that they will warp it a bit so that it isn't exactly the same as the current VP8 (as that's what the ISO/IEC group's charter is to develop new standards). That's one of the reasons why Microsoft didn't try to standardize WM9/10 codecs with the ISO/IEC standards body and they instead went to SMPTE (which has a history of just stamping "standard" on proprietary implementations). Unsuprisingly, SMPTE dutifuly stamped Microsoft's codec as SMPTE 421M (aka VC-1) w/o any substantial changes.

Re:VP8 is terrible

[Kalriath]

No, it means "not charged per use". You can be charged an upfront fee for a royalty-free license.

My perspective

[xiphmont]

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"

Re:My perspective

[xiphmont]

When MPEG LA first announced the VP8 pool formation, a rush of companies applied to be in the pool, partly because everyone wanted to see what everyone else had. That gave way to some amount of disappointment. And by 'some amount' I mean 'rather a lot really, more than the MPEG-LA would care to admit.'

Eventually, things whittled down to a few holdouts. Those '11 patent holders' do not assert they have patents that cover the spec. They said '_may_ cover'. The press release itself repeats this. Then these patent holders said 'and we're willing to make that vague threat go away for a little cash'. Google paid the cash. This is what lawyers do.

That's why it's a huge newsworthy deal when companies like NewEgg actually take the more expensive out and litigate a patent. It is always more expensive than settling, even if you'd win the case, and very few companies are willing or able to do it. Google was probably able, but not willing.

We deal with this in the IETF all the time. Someone files a draft and a slew of companies file IPR statements that claim they have patents that 'may' read on the draft. Unlike other SDOs though, the IETF requires them to actually list the patent numbers so we can analyze and refute. And despite unequivocal third-party analyses stating 'there is no possibility patent X applies', these companies still present their discredited IPR statements to 'customers' and mention that these customers may be sued if they don't license. This is not the exception; this is standard operating procedure in the industry. These licensing tactics, for example, account for more than half of Qualcomm's total corporate income.

It's this last threat that Google paid a nominal sum to make go away. It's the best anyone can hope for in a broken system. If those 11 patent holders had a strong claim, it is exceedingly unlikely they would have agreed to a perpetual, transferable, royalty free license.