Submitted by Well, this rumour, coming from the reputable Wall Street Journal, isn’t entirely unsurprising. Apparently, the omnipotent people familiar with the matter have told the WJS that the US Department of Justice and the California State Attorney General’s office are investigating the MPEG-LA for possible anti-competitive practices regarding VP8.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s sources, the problems stems from the MPEG-LA creating legal uncertainty over the status of Google’s VP8. “Antitrust enforcers are investigating whether MPEG LA, or its members, are trying to cripple an alternative format called VP8 that Google released last year – by creating legal uncertainty over whether users might violate patents by employing that technology,” the sources told the WSJ.
So basically, the DoJ would be investigating the MPEG-LA for spreading FUD. If the acronym ‘FUD’ appears in any of their official reports, it’s already a win – whether they actually find something or not.
The DoJ, the California State Attorney General’s office, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all declined to comment, but the confirmed patent troll Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG-LA, did have something to say. “We are effectively a convenience store” for licensing patents, he told the WSJ, “We have no dog in that fight.”
Which is a lie, of course. The MPEG-LA’s business model consists of them providing easy access to the various patents covering – in this specific case – H264. While part of that money goes to the actual patent holders, it’s obvious the MPEG-LA keeps a share for itself. If the web were to move to a format for web video that doesn’t require anyone to pay the MPEG-LA – they’ll be missing income. Stating they don’t have a dog in this fight is a flat-out lie, but then again, what did you expect from a patent troll?
Laws regarding antitrust and monopoly abuse and such can be incredibly obtuse, but fact of the matter is that every video product is pretty much forced to pay protection money to the MPEG-LA; regarding video standards, it’s pretty clear they wield monopoly-like power over an entire industry. Whether it actually fits the various legal definitions of what a monopoly is, I don’t know.
We’re also approaching the point where the MPEG-LA’s licensing structure no longer fits the various definitions of open standards as used by governments around the world. The European Union demands any patents part of an open standard be royalty-free, and the UK government, too, recently added royalty-free as a key requirement. This means that depending on where you live, H264 is not an open standard – a decided disadvantage compared to VP8 that the MPEG-LA is trying to overcome.
Not by changing their own product – but by spreading FUD about the others. Even after ten years of empty threats, they still haven’t got any patents regarding Thoera or VP8, since they had to ask the industry to send them patents. It’s all such thinly veiled attempts at FUD it surprises me there are still people defending the MPEG-LA.
Let’s hope the DoJ manages to do something about the MPEG-LA’s death grip on the video industry. This organisation is pure poison, led by a known patent troll, and ought to be eradicated.
The very existence of the patent system, especially with regard to software, is the direct cause of legal uncertainties. It seems a bit ironic that a government would open an antitrust investigation against a monopoly effectively granted by itself. At this point, isn’t it time to admit that the system may be flawed?
Figures anyone? What massive percentage of MPEG-LA’s income is derived from web video content? Of course you can leave in there what they get from iTunes because there’s no way known to man Apple will move to WebM. It’s also arguable that any commercial content provider would make that switch due to the additional production requirements – but for argument sake lets say the others all do. If this is the one big reason why they’re fighting it, how about some real verifiable figures to back up the claim.
Or is it just more FUD to add to the growing pile?
What if Google TV uses VP8 ? And (almost) all smartphones support VP8 ? And so on, I think it will set in a decline for the market share of codecs from MPEG-LA.
Google is already working hard on getting hardware out there which supports VP8 ‘in hardware’.
Just an example even some games from Microsoft use the Ogg-audio codec after all (no i don’t remember which ones and they might have been commissioned).
And Microsoft and an MPEG-LA member (or whatever it is called).
Google TV could cure cancer and no one would care. It’s the reanimated corpse of bad settop concepts from the ’90s, still as ugly, overcomplicated, underpowered, and unappealing as the first round of WebTVs.
What if Google threw a party and nobody came? They’re the only one making any VP8 content. Are you sure that will substantially change just because every toaster and doorknob can play it? It never worked out for the broadly licensed WMA/PlaysForSure – a single popular holdout killed the entire ecosystem despite its broad penetration. And I don’t think either DRM or licensing fees will affect the outcome here. People buy products that are good at doing things, not the ideas behind how they do those things.
The only new outcome mass penetration on smartphones would allow for VP8 is that YouTube could drop h.264 support, thus providing Flash on PCs, VP8 on Android, and consequently nothing on iOS, WP7, and anyone else who doesn’t play along. That seems much more like monopolistic shenanigans to me, as Google would be using their monopoly Web video site, which it acquired due to its search and ad monopoly, to force the market to adopt its technology in unrelated smartphones. They happen to be giving away said technology, but I’ve never been much for the notion that the ends justify the means. After all, Microsoft killed commercial Web browsers through an almost identical series of steps.
I doubt that would ever happen, though, partially because every phone based on not-iOS, a.k.a. Android, is racing to be the one to make Flash usable, so Web video is and will foreseeably remain a two-horse race between h.264-powered HTML5 and lazy Flash blobs, also usually containing h.264.
You may be thinking of the Black & White games, which are from Lionhead Studios, acquired by Microsoft after B&W2’s release. Not to get too far off topic, but while I consider OGG completely useless for a music collection (the tagging support is monumentally terrible), it makes some sense for in-game sounds. The game is the playback software, so not needing a license is definitely good, the sound is plenty good enough, and cripplingly bad tagging won’t be an issue because it’s not an open-ended personal library, but a statically indexed soundtrack.
You won’t find many people in favor of expensive licensing on principle, but you will find that those willing to pay some of the time tend to be more practically-minded most of the time.
sites like… youtube?
I think you mis-clicked, dude.
Your comment has nothing to do with the above post.
If Apple refuses then they will be marginalized thats all. They aren’t the be all end all in the video distribution business. Microsoft refused also and so Google created plugins for the pertinent MS products. I’m sure they’ll do the same for Apple products unless Apple uses their well known anticompetitive practices to block such innovation on their platform. I wouldn’t put it past them to do it.
<p>
A good bet would be next to nothing.
MPEG LA has patent pools for:
MPEG 2
ATSC
AVC/H.264
VC-1
1394 (Firewire)
H.264 licensing isn’t all that complex:
Web video free to the viewer is royalty free.
Sales or rentals of short subjects – 12 minutes and under – are royalty-free.<p>
Royalties on features sold or rented by title are 2% of sales or 2 cents each, whichever is less.
Royalties on subscription sales are based on the number of subscribers. Sales to 100,000 subscribers or less are royalty free.
There are about 1,000 H.264 licensees and 30 H.264 licensors.
Most are fundamentally industrial and commercial.
They manufacture (or purchase) digital television systems (or components) for any of a dozen different markets.
Yes indeed, why would a company always talking about the open web use an actually open and free codec? Perish the thought.
“CEO of MPEG-LA, did have something to day”
I think you meant ‘say’
“CEO of MPEG-LA, did have something to day”
I think you meant ‘say’
Nah, sounds right first time around. “Something today” probably means a couple lines of coke and a half dozen spliffs!
Isn’t a patent by definition a legalized form of monopoly?
Well, antitrust law isn’t meant to prevent monopolies, per se, but to prevent _abuse_ of monopoly and/or anti-competitive activities directed at creating them.
MPEG-LA was created to do both.
When I first read this story I was quite elated but after I read through it a couple of times I have my doubts. Corporate power has become a major force while government bodies, even the judicial branches, tend to follow the money now. Lobbyists are more influential than the public and considering big time patent trolls like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, etc. make up MPEG-LA I’m hoping this isn’t just another ‘Comcast ignores, and disses, a FCC ruling’ kind of thing. Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago the government hexed 84,000 web sites going after just a handful of bad sites (10 I believe)? This was not because of some national security issue but simply because corporate, not public, interests prompted them to do so using bogus kiddie porn charges as a front for a copyright enforcement campaign.
Am sorry that this comment does not add anything to this discussion.
The acronym used for the name of the publication to this article’s source should be WSJ and not WJS.
[And I am sorry for my english as it is not my first language.]
Out of sheer curiosity, what is your first language?
Linguistics is a hobby of mine.
Why? It’s better than the english of most native speakers.
If Google made high quality 100% native VP8 plugins for Safari and IE, someone made high quality H.264 plugins for Firefox and Safari, and somebody (presumably MS) made high quality H.264 plugins for Chrome and Firefox on Windows, and someone else made high quality H.264 plugins for Firefox and Chrome on Linux. All open source
Then it really would not matter to most users what codec is video encoded with. Yes, there are Android (VP8) and iOS, WP (H.264). Eventually, a standard would win out on the server side, and handheld makers would ALL end up supporting whatever the winning standard is.
Now, I know some of this is already going on, Google announced VP8 plugins for Safari, and I think MS created H.264 plugins for Firefox.
In the end, I really don’t care if VP8 or H.264 wins out, all I care about is that is IS NOT F*&KING FLASH!
Why not Flash?
Honest question.
Why not Flash?
Uhh, because Flash is a stinking pile of poo if you don’t use Windows. Notice I said ‘open source’ plugins, Flash is completely controlled by Adobe, and it runs like absolute crap (poor performance, insanely high CPU usage, crashes, security issues, shall I go on) on anything non-Windows.
Both H.264 and VP8 play pretty darned well on Mac and Linux, even on ancient hardware with all software decoding. Chrome plays VP8 perfectly on an ancient 2006 core-duo, intel GMA Mac-Book laptop — about 10-20% CPU. Similar video on same machine with Flash is 100% CPU.
In any, case, whether or not they may have patent issues, VP8 and H.264 are both open standards with high quality open source encoders and decoders available for almost any platform.
Furthermore, it simply ridiculous to have the web dependent on closed source, non-standard proprietary plugins which are controlled by one company like Flash.
Yup.
H264 is inherently incompatible with open source due to its non-royalty-free nature.
H264 is completely controlled by MPEG-LA.
No. H264 is not an open standard. A requirement of being an open standard is that the patents part of it are licensed royalty-free. While some definitions require only RAND, the EU’s definition does not.
You are contradicting yourself. H264 is just as closed and controlled as Flash is. In fact – less so, since most (almost all) the specifications needed to build a competing Flash player are open and freely available – which is not the case for H264.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_Screen_Project
GNU/Copyleft isn’t the only way to be open source. H.264 is entirely open; it just isn’t free-as-in-beer.
Then the EU should learn English and/or Latin. The word patent literally means open, as opposed to closed-source and trade secret. Whether or not they’re giving it away for free for all use cases has nothing to do with open. And while I’m arguing semantics, it’s only because I’m responding to equivocation – this is not open vs. closed; it’s charged-for versus given away, which has consequences in terms of how and whether free-of-charge platforms can implement it, but it does not change the fact that the technology is open (just not free).
It’s about what the purpose is of an open standard – not about the literal meaning you may give to it in English. The purpose of an open standard is to make it accessible to everyone. The EU understands this, the UK understands this, the OSI understands this, w3c understands this, heck, even Microsoft does (they state royalty-free as a key requirement for a standard to be open). The fact hat several pre-digital, old-world standards bodies (because that’s where the lack of royalty-free comes from) do not work that way is none of my concern.
In this modern, digital world of the web, a standard should be entirely free and open. Any standard related to the web should be freely accessible and usable, without having to pay protection money to anyone. Anybody using or advocating H264 is against an open and standards-based web, since H264 can never become part of any standard related to the web – because it’s not an open standard.
Language is dynamic, and meanings change. Many bodies who actually produce “open standards” define “open standards” as being royalty-free. Even Microsoft defines open standards as royalty-free.
There is quite a push going on right now from people who do not endorse royalty-free to redefine the popular notion of “open standards” as merely being published standards. This is quite ingenious, because ‘open’ by itself does indeed mean not secret, and ‘standards’ by itself (in this context) mean interoperability specifications, so their stance is seemingly realistic.
However, this is not what the two-word combination actually means in common usage. In common usage “open standards” actually means: “interoperability specification which anyone may implement”. IOW, standards which are open to be implemented by any party at all, whoever wants to. And that in turn means that “open standards” must be royalty free.
H.264 is simply not an “open standard” under the accepted meaning, because h.264 is encumbered by royalties and is therefore not able to be implemented freely by anyone at all.
Edited 2011-03-06 11:55 UTC
No, Flash is a stinking pile of poo EVEN on Windows.
Flash sucks… but it could be even worse with content wrapped with Silverlight.
Whatever happened to that patent pool they were trying to put together against VP8? Wasn’t is supposed to be done by now?
And the list goes on. It does not matter to me which one’s are being served to me as long as it plays well on my PC. And Adobe has made significant advancement on playability on all supported platforms with significantly lower hit on CPU usage. Common consensus of course is to go for open sourced/open standards then so be it. As a consumer I just want to be able watch video on the net disregard of whatever technology it uses.
Indeed, for the average consumer from one of the wealthy countries it doesn’t really matter and it’s understandable. It’s easy to dismiss all this as just unnecessary ruckus. But consumers from less wealthy countries and families would disagree: there’s hundreds of small shops and schools world-wide who use old computers and Linux for cost-efficiency reasons, and for them the actual format and technology does matter. H.264 for example simply is not an open format in the sense that you can’t just write a H.264 implementation, you’d be breaking several patents laws in many countries. The tools used to play such content on Linux are unlicensed and there’s still several areas in the world where they’d be illegal to use and thus the afore-mentioned schools and shops can’t use them and can’t consume H.264 content.
What I’m saying is that there’s millions of really poor people out there who can’t afford to start buying licenses for this and that random stuff and they need a legal way of consuming information on the Internet, and for them the format of the content really is an important ascpect of it all. It’s easy to forget the rest of the world when you’re sitting in a comfy, cushioned chair in your warm home and no worries in sight.
And this was just about consuming the material, but how about producing it? The poorer the people are the more need for information and education they have, and thus again the ability for them to create study material is important. Here’s where again the different formats and such are important: if they use unlicensed tools to create the material they’re often breaching several laws and they must either choose between trying to help those in need and possibly facing fines or jail-time, or forgetting the whole thing.
All in all, there’s plenty of good reasons why open formats and definitions are important even when they don’t matter much to you personally. We just need to keep head cool and look at the bigger picture.
EDIT: I just thought to add that I am not attacking you personally, but your comment so well reflects the general opinion in our wealthy nations and thus I felt it was a good point for me to.. well, ramble again. It just is that these things must be repeated and repeated and repeated for people to start even thinking about anything else than their own navels.
Edited 2011-03-06 06:49 UTC
Agree with you, but for me it’s more about the larger picture of what’s good for the web. To take another example, most consumers were perfectly fine running IE7 – it would display basically every webpage, and that’s all the average consumer really cared about. But i think it was important to have Firefox (and then Webkit) gain popularity. The web would be completely different, and weaker, right now if that hadn’t happened. I think in 5 years people might say the same about VP8. Or not, if it gets patent-destroyed.
Edited 2011-03-06 07:02 UTC
[/q]EDIT: I just thought to add that I am not attacking you personally, but your comment so well reflects the general opinion in our wealthy nations and thus I felt it was a good point for me to.. well, ramble again. It just is that these things must be repeated and repeated and repeated for people to start even thinking about anything else than their own navels. [/q]
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Thanks. Non taken (Offense). I’m from Malaysia. We’re not super rich. However you’re kinda right, my machine can handle anything thrown at it. It is quad-core and more than ample RAM and soon to be upgraded to 6-core.
But the thing is when did I ever had to pay anything for contents on the net (Unless it’s pay per view). I’m an average user in the sense that I don’t create content, I mostly consume and even if I do create content (For my own consumption) I’ve never had to think about licenses.
All these patent mess is regrettable with all these 800lbs gorillas bullying and kicking unnecessary ruckus are outright tech terrorists.
Edited 2011-03-06 08:43 UTC
Windows and OSX come with H.264 licenses and a several others, so yes, you’ve paid for them already.
Graphics cards come with hardware video acceleration which includes video decoding of H.264, so if you have paid for such a video card on your Linux machine, even Linux has a paid-for license.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license
“An implied license is an unwritten license which permits a party (the licensee) to do something that would normally require the express permission of another party (the licensor). Implied licenses may arise by operation of law from actions by the licensor which lead the licensee to believe that it has the necessary permission.
Implied licenses often arise where the licensee has purchased a physical embodiment of some intellectual property belonging to the licensor”
In this case, the video card has an embedded physical embodiment of the H.264 decoder IP. When you purchase such a piece of hardware (even for the purpose to run Linux on it) you have an implied license to use whatever is on that card.
It only covers the hardware encoder, libx264 etc. are still unlicensed.
Indeed, but that doesn’t really help when the software is still unlicensed. You still don’t have legal right to play or encode H.264 under Linux unless it is all handled by the hardware, and for now very few applications know how to do that.
That would be double-dipping on the part of those licensing H.264. They get just one cahnce to charge people for using H.264, not two. Since customers who buy hardware have a reasonable expectation to be able to use that hardware, MPEG LA’s best cance to collect license royalties is with the purchase of the hardware.
If MPEG LA missed that opportunity, that is just their bad luck, as the purchaser of the hardware now has a license to use it. MPEG LA don’t get a second bite at the cherry … as long as Linux systems use the hardware support, they have a perfectly legal license to decode H.264.
They aren’t licensed to decode h.264, it’s each individual patent that gets licensed. Your interpretation depends on every single one of those patents being implemented aboard the hardware, and none of them still being in software. That might well be the case, but i’m not sure if it is or not. If even a single one of those patents is still being done in software as part of the codec or video player, then it would still need to be licensed separately.
If true, this is all the more reason to utterly avoid H.264. If true, then even when you have paid for it, you haven’t paid for it.
AFAIK, MPEG LA at one time even wanted to go for triple and quadruple dipping, where they would charge people for a license when: (1) purchasing hardware, (2) purchasing software, (3) viewing video, and other parties when (4) streaming the video to those viewing.
Normally, I would call this practice hiding costs, false advertising (e.g. when a video card says on the box it “supports h264 video”, but it doesn’t cover all of h264 video at all), and quadruple dipping. That would be illegal.
Edited 2011-03-06 22:54 UTC
Google: Here is WebM, after extensive investigation we found it is patent free, so enjoy everybody!
MPEG LA: We are desperate to look for patents against WebM. Please someone, come forward and help us out.
Google: MPEG LA is all hat, no cattle.
DoJ: You know MPEG LA, you can’t actually scream “Patent violations!” without having any applicable patents.
Edited 2011-03-07 05:33 UTC
Heh.
Thanks for the summary.
I dug the Texan(?) slang.
You are quite welcome.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=all%20hat%2C…
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_hat_and_no_cattle
http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/all+hat,+no+cattle.htm…
For myself, the local equivalent idiom would be:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_bark_and_no_bite
It seems to fit very well indeed.
Edited 2011-03-07 09:48 UTC