Comments on: Why WebM Will Raise Costs for YouTube — And Everyone Else

By: Jon Smirl

Jon Smirl — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:35:25 +0000

MPEG-LA owns a patent troll.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100430/0232599255.shtml

My trust in patent trolls is total – they will definitely do what ever they can to extract the most money possible out of the market place.

By: Tim F.

Tim F. — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:27:36 +0000

OSS supporters claim FUD with valid patent concerns, the bait-and-switch argument is just as much FUD. It’s not worth consideration.

By: Steve Lhomme

Steve Lhomme — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 22:22:52 +0000

It’s the web, stupid
http://robux4.blogspot.com/2011/01/open-web-conspiracy.html

Still don’t understand why so few people got this simple fact yet. It’s simply avoid using patented tech on the web, ie the way it should be. No more, no less.

By: Jon Smirl

Jon Smirl — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:50:33 +0000

“effectively making free-to-view H.264 encoded video royalty-free indefinitely”. I thought that was being interpreted as “free” as in carrying no advertising. The whole point of YouTube is to carry advertising.

By: SB

SB — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:48:05 +0000

Just to clarify my post above: MPEGLA made permanent the moratorium on charging royalty fees for SERVING or DISTRIBUTING h.264 video FOR FREE on the web, but they still charge royalties for any software that implements h.264 and for websites that charge for viewing the videos. This is why I think that there are still more concessions that Google can squeeze from them.

By: Jon Smirl

Jon Smirl — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:47:41 +0000

We don’t know what the rates for encoding a web video for internet play are going to be. They aren’t collection royalties on this currently but they have said they will start in 2015. The rates for broadcasters encoding with h.264 in non-internet areas are quite high.

That’s the number that will kill Google. Even a dime would make them owe hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The $5-6.5M cap only applies to codec engines distributed.

By: SB

SB — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:40:37 +0000

Jon, you missed the big news a few months ago that MPEGLA changed the 2015 deadline on the current agreement of no royalty fees and made it a permanent moratorium. Here’s some info from a quick search: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/08/mpeg-la-counters-google-webm-with-permanent-royalty-moratorium.ars

I am personally starting to think that the real reason why Google made this change to Chrome is to pressure MPEGLA to drop their royalties for h.264 software in general (or at least browsers), and possibly change their stance of forbidding open source implementations, in order that all browsers will eventually be able to include h.264 support without violating anything and without cost.

The WebM trump card has worked well in obtaining concessions from MPEGLA in the past (see the arstechnica article above), so why not try to use it again? It’s like Google pulling MPEGLA aside and saying “make it free and available to all or we will never let you be THE web video standard.”

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:35:26 +0000

Mgeg-la can only raise costs by 10% every 5 years.

See
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-licensing-terms.html
Lots of good info.

By: Jon Smirl

Jon Smirl — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:44:44 +0000

I see two main reasons for doing this:
1) to have a real option when 2015 when comes around. If the MPEG-LA is unreasonable Google will 100% pull the plug on h.264. The existence of a credible webm option will keep MPEG-LA in check. Do you really want some of your major competitors (Apple, MS) picking the royalty number you are going to have to pay for h.264?

2) Firefox is screwed. Firefox is tri-licensed. One of those licenses is the GPL. From the GPL v2, “b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.” Firefox’s license prevents them for ever incorporating h.264. Same for Chromium.

So if MPEG-LA wanted to get rid of this problem, they could provide a royalty free license for web use until 2030 when their patents expire and be content with shaking down the hardware manufacturers. Instead they are trying to ingrain h.264 as a widely used standard. Then I fully expect to see robber baron level royalty requirements after 2015 unless there is something around to keep them in check.

By: Ryan Lawler

Ryan Lawler — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:27:20 +0000

Frankly I think licensing fears over H.264 are overblown, but see your point. Still, I think rhetoric based on infrastructure costs are even more overblown!