Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you | Hacker News Reader

Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you

engadget.com

16 pointstvon13 comments

Genuine question: how can they charge you for sending a file over the web?

Even if you accept patents, and software patents, since when did a patent on an encoder or decoder (or equivalently a compiler or runtime) then give you the ability to restrict what is done with the product created by that patented process?

Is this just some business model left over from the shiny disc era that no-one has bothered to question, or are a bunch of other folk going to start charging you to put things on the web.

I thought the GIF thing was about production of GIFs, but maybe they made the same claim?

(I'm also genuinely appalled that the only case he considers worth talking about is "will they charge me to watch cat videos on Youtube?", his advice if you want to do something "commercial" (whatever the hell that means)? "talk to a lawyer".)

I think that this is a very important point. The only reason you need to license something is if the law prevents you from acting without a licence.

However, if you are processing the video in any way, or shipping software that does, then you will need a patent licence, won't you? In this case, the license terms could impose appropriate terms (eg. "we will license the patent to you in return for $x for every file you send over the web").

Licensing an encoder might also come with extra terms in the EULA (eg. "if you give us $x we will let you use our h.264 encoding software but you must also agree to pay MPEG-LA $y under these extra terms").

So essentially the whole system can be enforced purely via contract law, non-withstanding the dubiousness of the validity of some EULAs.

This suggests to me that a Rapidshare-type site would not need a licence even though people can use it to send h.264 video over the web. However a Youtube-type site would, because they are doing h.264 processing themselves - and a licence could come attached with additional terms.

Ah, so this explains why even Final Cut Pro doesn't let you use the produced file commercially. It's not the web streaming you're paying for, you're actually paying (again) for the encoding. Even in the rapidshare case they know that you've not already paid to encode it commercially, and nor has the uploader, because they don't offer that licence.

> "but releasing the source to something doesn't erase any potential patent liability"

This line sounds fuzzy for me, then how does MPEG-LA can assert that H.264 is protected against a patent ambush by a third party that is not part of the consortium? Just because the standard is open and there's a large patent pool that belongs to the members of the consortium does not mean that a patent troll can't have a patent that covers some part of the codec.

That said I think that H.264 won the fight. I think however that video codecs, and associated patents, will grow in irrelevance at the same time video becomes more popular.

I think the protection here is in your group of friends. If you get sued for infringing on a patent because you're using Theora, you're pretty much on your own (maybe the EFF will help). If you get sued for infringing on a patent because of h.264, then (among others) Apple, Microsoft, Google, Kodak, Adobe, and dozens of other corporations (with much larger pockets than you) are also on the hook. The last thing they want is a precedent set saying using h.264 is illegal because you couldn't afford a good lawyer.

MPEG-LA takes responsibility for the patent infringement, so they get sued instead of you, and then they (with the backing of the other large companies who've contributed and licensed from MPEG-LA) fight the lawsuit, using the best lawyers money can buy. If nothing else, they'll make it so expensive to fight that any would-be patent troll will think very long and very hard about throwing their gloves into that ring.

Good answer, thanks.

You have big friends with the Xiph codecs. Almost all the big game publishers ship Speex, Vorbis, FLAC, and Theora. Epic, EA, Microsoft, etc. The adoption in that market is ridiculously high.

That's a lot of cash on the table for patent trolls to attack, but you don't have to stop there. Google and Mozilla both ship Theora and Vorbis.

Vorbis ships in silicon in lots of the non-Apple music devices.

Sure, the market of people using MPEG technologies is larger, but the market of people using Xiph codecs is by no means small.

Also, MPEG-LA does not indemnify from other patents. This is a common misconception. A patent owner is not going to sue MPEG-LA. They are going to sue Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other people with big bank accounts. Those companies may in turn sue MPEG-LA, but there is no incentive to sue MPEG-LA directly, just as their is no incentive to sue the Xiph.org Foundation directly.

EDIT: I didn't mean to say that all of them ship every codec. But all those listed do ship (or have in the recent past) one or more of the Xiph set.

Sigh, once again:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx

Q: Are all AVC essential patents included?

A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent. The purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing alternative to everyone on the same terms and to include as much essential intellectual property as possible for their convenience. Participation in the License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however.

Short version: There is no guarantee there will be no troll. No, they won't fight for you, it is your problem.

This very article claims that AT&T have patent claims on H.264 that aren't covered by MPEG-LA. You have to sort it out seperately.

This article mentions other standards that are managed in a way similar to H.264 such as bluetooth, USB, Wifi, etc... As far as I can recall, there hasn't been much consternation about whether or not to support any of these in Linux. Can anyone enlighten me as to why there is such a line in the sand with respect to H.264 from the perspective of the open source community and not these other standards? Are the terms of the H.264 a departure from what these other groups have done?

It's possibly just not true.

I tried Googling for USB royalty fees. There's some info about paying to get vendor IDs and use the logo, but I also found several saying that USB 2.0 was specifically created to be royalty free, including e.g. this quote:

"Frustrated by Apples royalty fees on firewire devices, in April 2000, seven industry-leading companies, consisting of Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, NEC, and Philips published the specifications for USB2.0."

All the main Google results for "Bluetooth royalty" actually found things saying royalty-free, including this about Wireless USB:

"The final abandoning of WiMedia may have come down to licensing battles. Foley said in the interview that the SIG asked WiMedia stakeholders to make their technology available on the same royalty-free basis as Bluetooth, so that it could be certified and licensed in the same way as the older standard. "Some WiMedia members weren't amenable to that," said Foley, wanting to hold on to their existing royalties, even in a market of "zero units", as he put it."

Those are all "hardware patents" which is apparently totally fine in the Linux world... because someone else is responsible for paying the license fees.

"... using H.264 to distribute free internet video to end users doesn't cost a thing, and won't cost anything until at least 2015. After that, it's up in the air, and that's a bridge we'll have to cross when we come to it -- there's a chance the MPEG-LA could start charging a royalty for free video in five years."

Oh, perfect. Let's get everyone accustomed to using this, and then start charging.

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