Hugh Todd wrote:
I had a listen Frank Casanova's talk, given recently at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Conference in San Francisco ( http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/ctia2004/ ), and was impressed by the commitment Apple appears to be showing to open standards in video and audio media. Is this not something that fits with the Web Standards ethos?
As far as I know,
Most web standards people are against web standards containing RAND licences of patented tech. Eg, the idea that writing an HTML browser shouldn't require payment; that's it doesn't matter if you earn money from it; and that there's no usage charges.
MPEG 4, as used in the current Quicktime rather than Sorenson, is patented and controlled by the MPEG-LA grou who have legal rights in the countries where they have patents.
This has quite a good write up about under what circumstances they'll charge (mostly around usage it seems): http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/mpeg4faq.aspx
As I understand it open source implementations of MPEG 4, like XviD, implement things that in some countries are patented. Eg, Patented stuff in XviD 0.9.x was not legal in the US or Japan unless you settled with the licence holders.
I haven't been on the list long so I hope this doesn't start a flamewar about proprietary Vs open, or using the software people have Vs. what's unpopular. I'm just trying to compare what I think the Web Standards ethos for licencing is Vs these video licences. And I don't mean to single out MPEG4 either, because MPEG 2, Sorensen, AVI (the container format), WMV, are patented and licenced similarly.
I don't know much about MPEG1 licencing but I'd guess that it's the same if only because of the audio format.
From a licencing standpoint I guess Ogg Theora, or the BBC's Dirac would be closest to web standards (free for anyone, allows commercial use, no usage charges).
I'm not a lawyer but I looked into this kind of thing a while back when trying to come up with a suggestion for a government standard on video and audio, and there weren't many open and free standards around.
.Matthew Cruickshank http://holloway.co.nz/
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