Matthew,
You make some good points. However:
1) The MPEG-LA ("Licensing Authority"), as far as I know, is only the legal clearing-house for the MPEG-4 technology, which has been developed at the behest of a large number of the manufacturers and developers in the video market. No one person or company owns the technology. There is a "patent pool". The upshot of this is that the technology is not public domain, but it is an ISO standard. In the same way that (now) Microsoft has submitted, and had accepted, a form of Windows Media 9 (VC 9) as *one* of the standards for the next generation of DVD.
(It's important to note the distinction between the 'technology licence' that, say, Microsoft charges for Windows Media - at a very reasonable rate - and a 'patent licence', which is the sort of thing MPEG-LA takes care of on behalf of its patent holders, and will manage for VC 9 as well.)
In an area in which advances have been made (and patented) by many people, such an arrangement is probably the best we can hope for, though it helps to have deployment companies like Apple going in to bat for us users to keep some sort of lid on costs.
2) Ideally there would be a 'free' standard, along the lines you suggest, and in keeping with the spirit of web standards. But as yet the sheer skill required to create such a thing *and* give it mass market distribution (with legally sourced content to drive its uptake) is not there. So the real world choices for us are:
a) Go for a proprietary format, whether Windows Media, Real, QuickTime or Flash, simply because the players are installed on large numbers of machines.
b) Go for a "standards-based" format even if, in some cases involving heavy usage, it involves (directly or indirectly) dealing with the gatekeepers, MPEG-LA. In this case, users will still need to have installed players able to recognise MPEG-4 files, and as far as I know these are Real and QuickTime only on PCs and Macs.
-Hugh Todd
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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