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Comment by anon1385 | Hacker News Reader

Apple and Microsoft also ship a lot of products that use H.264 and thus have to pay for their use of H.264, so I don't think it is at all obvious that is it a profit centre for them. Microsoft at least have said they lose money on it, and I doubt the situation for Apple is much different:

Though they have patents in the H.264 pool that MPEG LA licenses, Microsoft has said it pays MPEG LA twice as much in royalties to ship H.264-enabled products than it receives in royalty payments back. And Apple has only a single patent in the H.264 pool, so it appears its interests in H.264 and MPEG LA are not directly financial.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20038615-264.html

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Yes, and i should trust in that source? haha, of course! The point is that the whole conglomerate of companies is enough power to prevent competition and innovation (from the outside), to dictate prices, to dominate a whole market with whatever fits your companies strategy best. This constellation has never been good for the consumer. Nobody guarantees you that they're holding back with the fees until they can establish h.265 as the new defacto standard and then start raising fees, because eventually we'll have the same situation again as nowadays (hard decoders only support h264/265, etc etc). Again, there will be no competition, in a few years every video conference will be h264/5, every web video wil be h264, every Bluray, virtually every video.. If you have that kind of dominance you can do whatever the fuck you like. Like raising the fees and leeching the money out of companies because there is no choice. Atleast that's what i would do ;)

Except that the H.264 standard has been fantastic for consumers. I can get video from my Canon DSLR or Android phone, edit it in Final Cut Pro, save it to YouTube and watch it on my iPad. Or use the huge array of competitors e.g. Nikon, Premiere, Vimeo, Nexus 10.

You seem to be arguing that standards prevent competition. When in fact they cause it to flourish.

You don't seem to understand that i am all for open standards but against a monopoly, against so called "standards" that are defended by use of patents instead of innovation. The MPEG-LA is forcing a standard on people by misuse of patents. I'm certainly very much pro-standard! The same as i am against Office Open XML (a standard as well) but for OpenDocument Format (yet another standard).

To put it into one sentence: A standard should NEVER ever be controlled/represented/defended by a group of companies with monetary interests.

If you have a monetary interest in upholding a standard it is clear that you will try to prevent competition.

> A standard should NEVER ever be controlled/represented/defended by a group of companies with monetary interests.

You mean like VP8/WebM by Google?

Once something is unencumbered, there is nothing to stop forking. For example, Mozilla could take VP8, use a new container, evolve the codec, etc. There's the difference.

You try and fork H.264 you get sued.

The fundamental freedom in "open" is freedom to fork. Everyone forgets that.

VP8 and WebM are formats, not standards. Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM

I don't understand your argument here. It's not hard to look up how many patents MS or Apple have in the H.264 patent pool. It's then simple maths to see that neither of them hold a majority of the patents, so every H.264 licence they have to buy costs them money. Raising the price is against their interest while they continue to be big players in the market (and no, I don't believe MS have some long term plan to stop selling Windows and make money off video codec patents instead, the idea is ludicrous). I don't know how much say they have in the pricing, but I assume they have some influence.

The reason Apple and MS are ok with H.264 is that they are large and can easily absorb the cost, but it is harder for new players in the marketplace to do that, and harder for people at the cheaper end of the market where margins are much thinner. (There are other reasons too of course, like engineering time already invested in H.264, hardware support on millions of devices already shipped etc etc).

If you want to get anywhere with your argument then you are going to have to convince people at Apple and Microsoft and others. Calling them liars and dreaming up conspiracy theories about how they are going to make billions from MPEG-LA revenues won't help you convince them. Trying to publicly shame them with bad publicity isn't working and never had much chance of working because very few regular people care that Mozilla or Ubuntu might have to pay royalties for video codecs.

Final word of advice: move development out of the US. There are plenty of countries that don't recognise software patents. Remember the crypto situation? The answer there was to move crypto development outside the US. Make software patents into an argument about "US Jobs", and you will have a much easier time convincing legislators. At the moment they are being told that software patents protect US jobs, and that argument is always going to trump more ethereal ones about fair competition and freedom.

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