On Jan 14, 3:11 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <[email protected]> wrote: > H.264 may not be free to distribute if you have a blog that contains some > ads, even if you're only earning pennies a day.
It is free. According to this analysis of the current MPEG LA license agreement (valid 2011-2015), ad-supported H.264 video is free: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/a-closer-look-at-the-costs-and-fine-print-of-h264-licenses/2884?pg=2 > This sounds great, but with H.264 in the mix, what if some of those plugin > help files contain H.264 video, rendered via video tags? Does the eclipse > foundation have to pay licenses? I don't know if you have to pay if users don't pay for the video since that what the licensing term spell out. Distributing commercial video is free if it's twelve minutes or less; beyond that payment is based on whether users pay per video or by subscriber. > No, wait, scratch that, does the Eclipse > Foundation have to divert some funds to a legal war chest in case the > MPEG-LA insists they have to do so, even if the MPEG-LA is wrong? In this day and age, as a bigger organization you need to be ready for being sued on patent and trademark infringement, H.264 or not. Sad, but true. > This situation (having to think about licensing stuff in the first place, > nevermind if you actually need to pay it, or reserve a war chest in case the > MPEG-LA insists you do have to) is highly detrimental to smaller web > endeavours. If you ship H.264 encoders / decoders in hardware or software, you don't pay anything for the first 100,000 units you ship, after that it's 20 cents per unit up to 5 million and 10 cents per unit above 5 million; it's currently capped at $6.5 million per enterprise. This sounds reasonable to me for anything at $10 retail or above. According to this analysis from last June, this is independent of how many actual product models you have (so for Apple, this means OS X, iOS devices and its video software all count towards the same cap - I think): http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-licensing-terms.html The whole premise of WebM is that Google owns all the patents so WebM users don't have to pay anything. The Problem: As with Android, Google doesn't grant a patent indemnification on WebM. So if HTC builds an Android phone with a WebM decoder and then a patent troll / MPEG LA sues for patent infringement, HTC is on its own, just as it is in Apple's Android suit (which Apple shouldn't have started in the first place, but that's a different story). Now you can say this is all FUD but we've been down this road before: Microsoft thought it had all the patents to its VP-1 codec (its H.264 competitor) and could give it away for free, beating H.264. But then a lot of patent owners showed up, and now VP-1 has a patent pool, just as H.264, and VP-1 is only widely used by Microsoft and Netflix. WebM is not that different from H.264, so it may already be in patent trouble. Finally, given Google's somewhat strained relationship with content owners worldwide (books, newspapers, movies, television), I don't see the movie and television study enthusiastically embracing a Google-backed technology. WebM only shipped in Chrome so far, so there's not a lot of damages to claim, so there are no suites. What happens when WebM ships on a hundred million Android phones? I don't know, but I wouldn't rule out suites, at least from MPEG LA defending H.264. So I think the patent worries don't go away with WebM, they just get moved into the future. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
