I fail to see how any of the comments made so far actually help.

First, there seems to be a perception amongst responders that somehow the ITU 
is there develop royalty costing codecs and nothing could be further from the 
truth. Both ITU and IETF set up processes to deal with IPR on contributions 
made to their respective organisations, and they are not that disimilar. Indeed 
the creation of both the 3GPP and 3GPP2 organisations was in some respect the 
failure of ITU to deal with the embedded IPR problem and develop appropriate 
standards as a result. It is perfectly possible that IETF could have developed 
H.264 with all of its embedded IPR under the current IETF rules. So trying to 
draw a line like "royalty free" does not really help.

Secondly, IETF does not have to justify to ITU what work it does, in the same 
way as ITU does not need to justify to IETF what work it does. This is not 
saying cooperation is bad, but IETF is an SDO in its own right, and it does 
whatever work its members decide is best for the community it serves. While I 
would prefer not to have multiple video codecs in the market, ultimately the 
market decides.

So any response IETF makes should concentrate on what we want or need from ITU 
(and other external bodies), and persuading them to support our needs. Some of 
this is already written into the draft charter. I would identify:

1)    The IETF needs to gain access to the accumulated level of expertise in 
existing IPR, in order to identify that their solution has avoided as much as 
possible. Much of that expertise exists outside IETF, and in bodies such as 
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29.

2)    I believe there needs to be cooperation on methods of assessment. The 
crowd sourcing model used by IETF on its audio codec is totally alien to 
anything used by ITU, and I guess similar issues apply in reverse. The market 
will therefore never be able to compare results to decide which is better from 
a performance perspective.

regards

Keith

________________________________
From: video-codec [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Adam Roach
Sent: 08 May 2015 15:47
To: Timothy B. Terriberry; Alissa Cooper; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [video-codec] LS from ITU-T SG 16

On 5/8/15 09:24, Timothy B. Terriberry wrote:
Alissa Cooper wrote:
As the liaison statement notes, there are many concurrent ongoing
efforts to develop video codecs, and the NETVC work would merely be one
additional such effort. We do not view the proposed NETVC work as
harmful for interoperability, but rather as helpful, considering the
fact that at present the licensing environment creates barriers to full
interoperability in many cases.

I think the important point is that there are *no* existing standardization 
efforts with the simultaneous goals of best-in-class performance *and* 
royalty-free licensing (however we choose to phrase that).

I agree that this is the elephant in the room. The dismissal in the LS of this 
aspect of the work uses sleight-of-hand to replace "royalty free" with a phrase 
that means something very different. This either misses the point of the NETVC 
effort, or feigns ignorance. In either case, I believe a clarification on this 
specific point is appropriate.

Perhaps something like: "One key distinction of the NETVC work as compared to 
other efforts to create high-quality codecs is a differentiation between 
'licensing terms that would enable broad use,' which is a subjective 
distinction, and 'royalty-free licensing terms,' which is a factual one. 
Conversely, a distinction from existing efforts to create royalty-free codecs 
is the explicit goal of achieving quality on par with modern, state-of-the-art 
codecs."

/a
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