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Comment by tymekpavel | Hacker News Reader

"I cannot, don’t even think about it, just plain can’t, make money from MPEG/H.264/AVC videos I create. For that, I need to buy another something from somebody."

This was pretty surprising to me. Why does Apple not allow making money from MPEG videos that you create? Does this include uploading them to YouTube?

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It is to do with MPEG-LA licensing.

Apple and Microsoft licensed the H.264 codecs for content creation which is a per user cost. They know this based on how many downloads. Users who sell their videos need to pay MPEG-LA a license per view which Apple/Microsoft can't determine. Hence you are on your own.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...

Thanks, this is a good explanation of the "why".

Interesting, this means you can't use OS X to make your videos if you're a Youtuber.

Does YouTube pay the license fee for YouTube viewer? I would expect so.

That's not the point. With the built-in encoder, people create movies which they make money from. Now, Youtube recodes those when you upload them, however, the "original" movie was created on a Mac. And apparently the license states you can't profit from making H264 videos on OS X.

Whether this is something people could actually get sued for is doubtful. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if some shady company who is nominally a member of the consortium chose to go after the more successful Youtubers. At the very least it's something a consortium company could use to take down videos they don't like.

I think the MPEG-LA $ license is about distributing encoded videos that the viewer decodes. If YouTube transcodes, you aren't distributing encoded videos to anyone , except maybe YouTube itself, for one play.

But I could be mistaken, I haven't checked carefully.

This is why we aren't seeing things like Opus codec support in Safari. Apple is engaging in a codec war. I really hope it makes them a lot of money because for me as a developer doing web audio it's like the difference between FireFox circa 2005 and IE.

The tech industry sold its soul, mainly because of Apple, and standardized on the "free" H.264/MPEG standard for videos. The caveat is that it is only free to end users for consumption (hence "free") and the bits included to handle encoding/decoding within your operating system or browser, doesn't legally allow you to produce content for others to consume.

H.264 comprises a ridiculous number of companies. It isn't just Apple.

As we saw with VP8 there is no such thing as a truly free and open codec. Back in the day MPEG-LA was going to setup a VP8 patent pool but didn't bother and instead just licensed Google the infringing patents. If they didn't do this VP8 could have been open but not free.

There are just too many large and powerful players with competing interests and a penchant for litigating against any possible upstarts. The only way to fix the situation is to exempt all file formats from patent claims as it is clearly anticompetitive.

The only way to fix the situation is to exempt all file formats from patent claims as it is clearly anticompetitive.

This is clearly the correct answer, or at least part of it. Many real world problems in the technology industries would never have existed if intellectual property laws could not be applied to restrict communication and compatibility. Allowing patents to effectively restrict the transfer of data, because the tools available to either or both parties effectively require patented formats or similar, is either a tax on communication or a tool for censorship, depending primarily on the willingness of the patent holder to licence on useful terms.

Ironically, the US actually got this right in the case of fonts and copyrights, in that while a specific program to describe a font might be subject to copyright, the design of the font itself is not. Thus unlike certain other creative industries, no-one can go around claiming royalties on every publication displayed in a sans serif font because it looks a bit similar to something from the early 1900s and (insert dubious legal argument about derivative works restarting the copyright clock here).

MPEG-LA had a very long time to assemble their VP8 pool, but nothing ever materialized. The impression I got was that Google paid them for silence, in a way that let them save face. Regardless, it's a clear sign that patents are failing our society when it might be impossible to write a free video codec from scratch.

When will the patents expire? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA suggests that new patents are being added to the pool and full licensing fees are needed even if 999 patents are expired and 1 is active.

I was referring to the fact that it was primarily due to Apple refusing to support any format other than this, not that they were the sole patent holder or sole beneficiary. Google and Mozilla were all for standardizing on an open format. Microsoft was basically indifferent and was going to drift whichever way the wind blew. Apple was against the proposed open formats and insisted on standardizing on the proprietary format they had a stake in both in terms of sharing in the patent revenue and the fact that they already had hardware decoding support in their iDevices. The latter point is likely the main driver.

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