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Comment by zmmz | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it's a well written article and provides a very good overview. The tables are especially helpful.

However, there is one rather large oversight:H.264 is an open standard

This is not necessarily correct. As a citizen of the EU, I have to disagree. One of the EU pre-requisites[1] for something being qualified as an Open Standard is: The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#European_Union_de...

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It would appear that Steve Jobs agrees too. In his "Thoughts on Flash" he mentions several times that HTML5 is an Open Standard and contrasts this favourably with Flash. But when he talks about H.264 he refers to it simply as an industry standard.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I'd think that H.264 isn't subject to this definition - or, at worst, it falls in a gray area of sorts - as the H.264 technology is unencumbered by license fees if it's used non-commercially. No developer of gratis software using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 tech. has ever been subjected to a legal case initiated by the MPEG-LA.

> the H.264 technology is unencumbered by license fees if > it's used non-commercially

That's not true, unfortunately.

There may have been no lawsuits (I can't comment on that, though I'd like to see your data). But that's just because the MPEG-LA hasn't felt like suing people. If you're shipping an H.264 encoder or decoder in binary form to people and not paying the relevant licensing fees, then you're infringing on the patents. There's no exception for "non-commercial" use there last I checked. If you think there is, please cite.

They probably won't do it.

Somebody will come up something similar to the hack/exploit that Mozilla did: set up a for-profit corporation to receive money and a non-profit foundation (which owns 100% of corp's shares) to do the development. Then they can claim that the non-profit foundation is the one that's really using the patents and hence should not have to pay royalties.

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