Linked by Eugenia Loli on Sat 1st May 2010 22:17 UTC
We've all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing "delivery" codec in the market, which is h.264. "Let the best win", I kept thinking. But it wasn't until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends. It's not just a matter of just "picking Theora" to export a video to Youtube and be clear of any litigation. MPEG-LA's trick runs way deeper! The [street-smart] people at MPEG-LA have made sure that from the moment we use a camera or camcorder to shoot an mpeg2 (e.g. HDV cams) or h.264 video (e.g. digicams, HD dSLRs, AVCHD cams), we owe them royalties, even if the final video distributed was not encoded using their codecs! Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
UPDATE: Engadget just wrote a reply to this article. The article says that you don't need an extra license to shoot commercial video with h.264 cameras, but I wonder why the license says otherwise, and Engadget's "quotes" of user/filmmaker indemnification by MPEG-LA are anonymous...
UPDATE 2: Engadget's editor replied to me. So according to him, the quotes are not anonymous, but organization-wide on purpose. If that's the case, I guess this concludes that. And I can take them on their word from now on.
UPDATE 3: And regarding royalties (as opposed to just licensing), one more reply by Engadget's editor.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
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Congratulations for your article, Eugenia. I agree entirely with your ideas.
I think that the root of the problem is that today in USA companies are patenting signal-processing algorithms ! It is like patenting mathematics !
Processing an unidimensional signal like sound or bidimensional signal like an image or a tridimensional signal like a video is a mathematical algorithm.
Imagine if in the past companies had patented the Fourier Transform
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform
and we had to pay royalties to use it. We simply would not have many communication and electronic products and services.