Well, you said it. Specifically, you said "I think", and a gigantic set of (admittedly reasonably looking) numbers.
It's convoluted, no matter how reasonable all that looks, and somebody somewhere is going to end up having to pay for something or the MPEG-LA wouldn't be in business. My original notion still stands as far as I can tell: This fundamentally weakens the web because you can't just treat the videos like you'd treat, say, your HTML files or your images or your Vorbis audio files (legally speaking). Possibly WebM, OggTheora, and in fact no other video format other than ridiculously inefficient ones could ever offer you that kind of legal bliss, because of submarine patents and all that, but I'm not entirely convinced this battle is already lost. Kudos for finding all that. We do actually host some video, both in Theora and H.264 format, on projectlombok.org, and while I was fairly sure I was in the clear, I'm more sure now. You're probably right on WebM not being much loved in the content owners world, though presumably techies will like it, and just maybe they'll end up making this decision because they build the websites at the end of the day – Eh, maybe. More likely the lawyers will get involved and choose H.264 because they can pay the reasonable terms and feel (probably justifiably so) legally more in the clear that way. NB: Does MPEG-LA offer patent indemnification? -- 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.
