Google might be trying to shake up video on the web by releasing the
WebM video format and VP8 codec under a royalty-free open-source license, but we've already heard the format's uncomfortably
close relationship to H.264 might cause some patent concerns, and the MPEG-LA, which licenses the H.264 patents, doesn't seem to be sitting still. CEO Larry Horn told
All Things Digital that MPEG-LA is looking into forming a patent pool in order to license vendors who want stay clear of any patent disputes while using WebM -- the idea would be to avoid any patent liability down the road by simply paying for a license now, especially since Google doesn't seem to be promising anything when it comes to protection from lawsuits. We'd wager all this means WebM will go from royalty-free to patent-encumbered just as soon as MPEG-LA gets its paperwork in order -- the same thing essentially happened to Microsoft when it tried to release the VC-1 format royalty-free -- and that means video on the web might soon be
right back where it started. We'll see what happens.
posted May 21st 2010 11:48AM
So What?
@raiden8383
Free comes at a cost, always does...
@raiden8383 Apple should just buy H.264, to complete the circle of evil.
This may be overstating the obvious, but I'm sure Google has a few corporate lawyers who look into this sort of thing before they go and deliver a keynote on it.
@raiden8383: What this means is that the adoption rate will be reduced drastically, especially if MPEG-LousyAssholes ends up charging more to license (i.e. safeguard against being sued to oblivion) WebM than it does h.264. I'm not insinuating they would do something so sleazy like that.
Not to mention, they are taking a stand on WebM. What they are doing is introducing fear to other companies as to the consequences of using WebM for commercial purposes. Who would want to take that risk? Just go with h.264. If you pay the fees, you have nothing to worry about, since that also comes with litigation protection.
@PhineasJW: Apple can't buy what isn't for sale.
Not to mention, I actually think there are a number of big players that own parts of h.264, like Microsoft. They all have patents on the codec. So they all have a vested interest in seeing it be the standard.
Even Microsoft has effectively abandoned VC-1. h.264 is their main push.
@PhineasJW
Right because apple doesn't offer anything that is open source...
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
and one of their largest open sourced projects
http://webkit.org/
@raiden8383
Didn't Steve Jobs say "VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be "H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder". Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today's overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn't manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious."
@Sled: Thats less "offer" and more "use".
Go to any Linux based forum and they will tell you about the bright history of Apple's contributions to the open source community.
@Ruben
They use alot of open sourced projects to make up osx, but they offer a vast amount of tools and resources so users can learn and develop applications off the open sourced projects.
@nickcraze
That makes me think of a song...
"Freedom isn't free... It costs folks like you and me..."
@Ruben
Microsoft pays more to use h.264 than it makes in royalties from h.264, so I don't really see why they would have a financial interest in it succeeding.
@mr88
Sure that may be the case today, but once it is full entrenched as the web video standard, what would prevent them from cranking up the royalty fees?
@raiden8383
I think this suits the issue quite nicely:
http://xkcd.com/743/
@Heiar Actually no, Steve Jobs didn't say a single word of that quote. He did link to it in an email response to a question, but he didn't say any of it.
@BiGD23
ahh, ok, thanx! :)
@Heiar
No, Steve Jobs did not say that. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
@PhineasJW
The reason why I said "So What?" is patent.
Patent should protect creative idea, and encouraging innovation. However, it really makes me sick recently.
What if somebody had a social networking website patent? Nobody can make a social networking website?
Recently I support open-source and royalty-free project. otherwise nobody can building anything in the future.
PS. S U APPL
@Heiar Actually, he didn't say that. That was an H.264 engineer talking. Jobs only linked to it.
@PhineasJW I don't think I'd worry too much about this. This seems like a last ditch effort for the MPEG-LA to squeeze some cash out of video providers before they all switch to WebM. It's akin to someone coming up to you and saying, "I may have a gun and I may not, but if you give me a hundred dollars I won't shoot you."
Right, just like Android isn't ripping off various companies' patents. You should go tell your fancy story to HTC.
@Ruben
Hopefully the EU's Digital Agenda will help coax greedy, power-drunk H.264 patent-holding companies (like Microsoft, Apple and so on) that it is a bad idea to try and extort cash for the right to exchange information over the web (in video or any other formats). I can't help thinking that it was no coincidence that Google announced WebM and VP8 on the very same day that the EU Digital Agenda was announced (which stresses the importance of openness and interoperability, and the importance of avoiding "lock-in"). So I would imagine Google has been talking to the EU, and that there will be pressure to choose an open and free standard for video. This could be done either by standardizing on the VP8 codec, or by pressuring the fat-cat patent holders of MPEG-LA to emulate Google's gesture and offer the H.264 codec -- that they all seem to be so very "attached" to -- to the world for free. Either way, we (meaning the world + Google) win.
There is no reason for people to pay and pay over and again just to produce, host, or view video on the web (which is the present case with H.264; someone somewhere is always paying royalties). Holding the "H.264 hammer" over people's heads, and being able to raise royalty fees, exclude smaller companies from producing/hosting video, or sue companies or people that the patent-holders "do not like" is exactly contrary to what an open web and the EU digital agenda is all about.
pdf at: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/documents/digital-agenda-communication-en.pdf
@PhineasJW All future Android devices will support WebM, and Android is just taking more and more of the market.
YouTube will be moving over to WebM.
More and more partners are signing up and supporting WebM.
WebM is being adopted faster than anything, ever.
Opinions. http://j.mp/google-web-m-format-answered
This is so stupid someone can't make a codec that's completely free no strings attached.
@pballinuyasha
http://stopsoftwarepatents.org/
It's ridiculous that the MPEG-LA thinks they can bully anyone who tries to come up with a royalty-free codec solution.
@pballinuyasha Nothing google ships has no strings attached, what makes you think that this would be any different?
@pballinuyasha You can, outside of the US. Hence the developement of the open-source x264 encoder for encoding H.264 material (and it outperforms commercial encoders too).
All this bullcrap is occurring solely because of the broken patent laws in the US.
@DoctarPeppar Well, the same companies that make up MPEG-LA are the ones introducing WebM and VP8, so it's no surprise that they'd want their share of royalties.
@r3loaded
Google should just do to the US what Hulu does to rest of the world:
"This video is not available in your country due to software patents."
That would be fun! ;-)
@pballinuyasha
I think MPEG-LA is a bit misunderstood. In fact, you don't even have to make a deal with MPEG-LA to use H.264, although you would have to make deals then with each of the companies that hold patents for H.264.
MPEG-LA is simply a group that has a deal with all (the important) patent holders for conveniently managing all the royalties at one time.
I really hate evil tech companies. They really have nothing better to do than try and rain on some other companies parade, rather than trying to compete by one-upsmanship or innovation
@216
you mean to say they shouldn't protect their innovation and let everyone get a peace of their hard work?
@nickcraze No, they just should be less greedy. Oh, btw, I'm happy to live in a country where software patents are just toliet paper. Patenting algotirhms is just one of the most stupid things in the world.
@nickcraze
See America needs to get rid of this stupid system of letting people patent Software. Although being a s/w guy myself, I would like protection for my work, the world is moving to open software solutions and its always better to contribute to that than just fight and not provide a concrete solution.
@216: Don't blame the tech companies. Blame the system that they exist in that allows them to take advantage of such rules.
@216
"Patenting algotirhms is just one of the most stupid things in the world"
you know toilet papers are pretty expensive now days, but it seems to you an Algorithm has no value? it's like saying those that created formulas such as E=mc2 shouldn't get credit for their work... I understand that some Algorithm are worthless but not all...
@nickcraze There's a difference between giving credit and having to license a patented process. Taking your E=mc^2 example, giving credit is acknowledging that Albert Einstein discovered this formula, and not pretending that you actually invented it. The equivalent to the MPEG-LA's stance would be having to pay licensing fees to whatever organisation that posthumously represents Einstein for whenever you want to build and run a nuclear reactor.
@nickcraze
The problem is that patents prevent someone independently coming up with an alternative solution/algorithm that is too similar to someone else's, even if they had never seen it and have no prior knowledge of it.
@nickcraze o yeah... right... we should have allowed the guy who invented integration and differentiation to pattent those algorithm, and hinder all kinds of progress by trying to blackmail the rest of the world...
Now this would be a smart move...
@nickcraze,
Of course software needs protection and for that we have Copyright protection. Globally, software is protected through Copyrights. Patent protection of the kind that exists in America is an idiosyncratic feature of the US.
Patent protection was originally devised for the industries that have real physical products for which research & development is a long drawn, expensive affair. Software is different. It does not require intensive research for long periods of time unlike physical products of other industries. Software by nature is evolutionary and can be developed at a rapid pace. Even the 'revolutionary' software products involve mere integration and improvement of existing code. Clearly, software patents have become a tool for impeding innovation rather than encouraging innovation thus defeating the very purpose for which they were created in the first place.
Its time to rethink the intellectual property regime for software in the US.
@r3loaded e=mc^2 is a formula from a model which has been prooven to describe the world in a very accurate way. It's not a way to do something. Video encoding is not a business horrobly filled with patents which suits to compare. If we move into bio tech this is a much more troublesome issue. How can you get a part of DNA patented because you happened to find it? But that's a completely different story...
@mantrik00 It's actually quite simple, but you state it a bit wrong. Patents are for physically implementable ideas, that are not protected by copyright or their design can be reverse-engineered without violating copyright(the designs themselves are protected by copyright).
Yet there can be years of R&D in software as well as hardware. And don't get me started on the amount of research that goes into fundamental sciences that really push the limits.
@mantrik00 "research & development is a long drawn, expensive affair." Creating a video compression standard IS a long drawn and expensive affair. Many of my colleagues have contributed to the H.264 specification and previous MPEG compression standards. It requires a lot of research by engineers who have a particular knack with signals and waveforms, but not necessarily software. A software or hardware implementation of the compression standard is the final product, but the goal is a specification (a piece of paper) that describes how one would go about building a decoder.
The reason why the MPEG-LA gets itself in a bunch about this type of announcement is b/c there are MANY companies with a stake in the specification. Companies send their researchers to standards meetings in hopes that they will have a winning contribution to the spec. For the company, it means revenue for each decoder sold, so long as their patents find their way into the spec. This process takes years, is very stressful due to politics and is quite expensive in terms of an employee's time and persistence.
In order for an open codec to work, it needs to be competitive to the closed standards in visual quality, compression ratio and ease of transmission. It will also need a big push for it to gain the trust and use of the industry. If broadcasters don't use the codec and websites don't either, it won't matter. Look at Theora, in many ways it is a very good codec, but it has no real traction.
All that said, I do think the MPEG-LA is taking the wrong approach here. If they have a problem, they should go directly to Google and sort it out as two companies. This was Google's bet and it should be their burden. Once again, without the time and effort spent, H.264 wouldn't exist. Also, On2 who designed the VP8 codec was also a business, this codec didn't come out of thin air and without any patents of its own.
@gmoshe27
With your knowledge of costs associated with H.264, would you say that the various developers have recouped their costs by now? I would hope that they have (otherwise it seems like a money-losing proposition).
In any case, I really do not see why the H.264 patent holders cannot just do as Google did and offer H.264 free to the world (even if it would be a small loss). And by loss, I do not mean "the next 100 years of profits from royalties", as I do not thing it is ethical to force the world's peoples to keep paying over and over again forever for the "privilege" of producing, hosting, or viewing video. MPEG-LA has set itself up to monopolize video information exchange, but Google has shown there is another way besides corporate greed to accomplish this.
I saw this coming...F the Mpeg-LA...what the hell is their deal?
@DoctarPeppar They're a mafia. Now they want you to pay them protection money so that they won't sue you in the future, even though you've done nothing that they can really sue you over. But they'll spout out enough FUD to make you think otherwise.
oh shit, competition... SUE THEM
Are those OVERHEAD PROJECTORS i see on the stage there?
Wow... welcome to 1945, Google!
@gotsmart No, they're mounted cameras pointing down onto small tables. It's for demoing mobile phones and other handheld devices.
They were used frequently during the Google IO keynotes.
@gotsmart I hope you were ironic :) those were cameras
@gotsmart gotFAIL?