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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

If you live in a country which doesn't allow patents for software, this is great news. I wonder why no one cares about it in this thread. Foreign laws is how we got DeCSS, VLC and Handbrake to name a few.

Mozilla could simply ship different packages for different countries, based on their patent laws. For example, US version could use binaries distributed by Cisco, while EU binaries could be built from source code maintained by Mozilla. IANAL but I think it would be completely legal as long as the company which distributes the EU version is a subsidiary or a separate legal entity located in EU.

You are free to use whichever package you wish. Of course it would be illegal if you live in a country that has software patent laws. But legality never stopped us from using VLC or Handbrake. Why should it now?

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Mozilla already supports (in code, not principle) H.264 by leveraging non-Mozilla code. It's not usually a problem on Windows on Mac since the user has already paid for a license when they bought the OS, but on Linux (gstreamer) it can cause patent violations within US.

I hope (an believe) Mozilla will keep that functionality to use one of multiple backends (Windows's fedia framework, gstreamer etc.) when it adds this Cisco binary.

We will need WMF at least until OpenH264 does High Profile, and I believe we are not going to be able to use only the OpenH264 binary blobs. Therefore we'll support other back ends (but not necessarily all possible back ends).

/be

If you live in a country which doesn't recognize software patents you should just have the superior x264 codec compiled into Firefox.

libx264 doesn't provide a decoder. Did you mean H.264?

This is for WebRTC, which means it consists of both a decoder and an encoder. The encoder is in many ways the harder part.

> If you live in a country which doesn't allow patents for software, this is great news

What country is this? H.264 is patented in every EU country: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p...

Well, they may publish on their site whatever they want, but if they won't be able to get local authorities' support for their claim, then this is just bluffing. You know, people may get scared and buy a license even if they don't have to, or if they plan to sell derived software products in patent-protected markets like USA. The most convenient way (in multiple aspects) to do so would be to talk with some European subsidiary. The H.265 patents also cover hardware implementations which probably aren't so patent-free, even in Europe.

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