I hate to reply twice, but John Watlington wrote: > it has never been tested in court
This is a non sequitur. A codec cannot be proved patent-free in a court. It can only be proved that some particular patent does not apply. If this is your standard, then buying licenses doesn't help, because a court cannot prove that some other unknown company doesn't hold an applicable patent. > This becomes a real problem when we start asking hardware > vendors to provide firmware supporting these "free" codecs. If a vendor is too paranoid to provide firmware, then we can write our own. They just need to provide docs, or partial firmware source code, under an NDA if necessary. Documentation does not expose them to any patent liability. --Ben
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