Getting Firefox to play patented formats may be good for you in a short-term
perspective. It is not at in a long term perspective.
Either Mozilla would have to spend millions in patent licenses or Mozilla
would get sued by MPEG and spend millions in litigation. In all cases, those
are millions that would not be spend in making Mozilla's software better.
Including for you.
Patent-encumbered formats getting popular (and by reading them on a daily
basis, you are somehow contributing to it) also has a long-term negative
effect on you. It makes powerful companies have an edge. They can pay the
(unfair) tax. As a consequence, their software can read the popular formats,
whereas free software, written by developers who cannot afford to pay the
tax, cannot.
Obviously, only distributing your works under patent-emcumbered formats is
even worse because it contributes even more to making these formats popular.
Software are written everywhere on the planet and distributed at an
international scale through the Internet. There is no such thing as a safe
country where users do not feel the effects of bad laws enforced in other
countries.
I took your selfish point of view to write the lines above. That said, the
strongest arguments to me has already been stated by other users of this
forum: I care about every user being free. Not only myself. If I can help a
user to get free, I want to do it. Even if I can personally enjoy the
freedoms she is denied.
