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 fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
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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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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
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I don't expect anything to come of this given the proliferation of MPEG-2/MPEG-4 devices and content creation tools over the past decade, but regarding the quoted text, the key would be how "video provider" is defined.
Google, for example, is a licensee and is the distributor of content on YouTube. It may be reasonable (depending on other references to "video provider" excluded from the quote) to conclude that in uploading to YouTube, the creator the video is meeting the "personal and non-commercial" clause as long as they aren't directly benefiting from the video's availability. Google is "a video provider licensed under the AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video" who then alters the content for their (not the user's) commercial interests by re-encoding, re-distributing, or attaching ads not in the original work. The provider could be the entity distributing the video to the end user, or it could be the encoder implementation that produces the video.
A narrow reading of the quote may imply the video provider is the camera user, but even professional videographers aren't personally licensees. The entities they shoot for may be. I think MPEG-LA just wants to be sure they're getting paid for the encoders/decoders. The license text could be clearer to better convey that intent.