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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting, that if they are not part of MPEG-LA, somehow these patents apply to VP8, but don't apply in any way to H264? Does that mean that most commercial MPEG-LA licensees also do separate deals with Nokia, or that by sheer coincidence, this boatload of patents manages to cover VP8 but does not intersect H264? It smells kind of funny, like there's an alternate motive besides looking for royalties.

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MPEG-LA doesn't claim to have all possible H.264 patents in their patent pool. Nokia has an FRAND obligation for H.264, so it's obligated to license on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but it has chosen not to be part of the pool.

MPEG-LA did not claim to have all possible VP8 patents either.

Note that MPEG-LA is basically a group that sets up convenient one-stop licensing, there's no such thing as being a "member" per se. You can be part of any of their patent pools, or not, if you believe you have essential IP.

No they did not claim to have all the patents, nor do I expect Google made this assumption (there's a never ending list!), but the timing is very curious. What does Nokia really want out of this if they are not interested in licensing under any circumstances?

This is not the first time Nokia did this. IIRC, they also threatened Ogg when it was being proposed as the mandatory codec for the <video> element.

Certain companies that have large installed bases of H264 hardware certainly have a vested interested in seeing H264 as the mandatory WebRTC codec.

Has any party actually proposed h.264 being made mandatory to implement for WebRTC?

Yes, Nokia, Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Ericcson, RIM, France Telecom/Orange, Qualcomm.

http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dbenham-webrtc-videomt...

IETF's royalty-free commitment isn't as strong as W3C's so unlike the HTML5 codec were they were just filibustering alternatives, they are actually arguing for H.264 to be MTI. But the VP8 camp is strong enough to at least prevent that, even if not strong enough to prevail as MTI itself.

There's some overlap with the groups that didn't want Opus made MTI as well (one of them submitted a patent against it too).

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