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How else will you charge people from implementing support for it?

Well, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder.

These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".

Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here

That's obviously less bad, but let's not pretend this is great either.

Yes, not great indeed. This is why we have av1, ogg, etc. with most of the hard research re-done just to sidestep those pesky patents.

For now at least - for H.264 AVC, the patents are expired in most countries and most of the final US patents that may apply to AVC High profile will expire in the first half of 2026 [1].

Except in Brazil, where there are even MPEG-4 patents still in effect (expiring later in 2026) and the H.264 patents will last until the early 2030s, I think because of a rule that gave 10 years extra but is now changed but not retrospective for these patents [2].

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

2. https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...

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