Free Software Camps Wading Into VP8 Patent Fight 113
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by Slashdot, Nokia recently notified the IETF that its RFC 6386 video codec (aka VP8, released by Google under a BSD license with a waiver of that company's patent rights) infringed several dozen of its patents; furthermore, Nokia was not inclined to license them under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminating) terms. While the list provided by Nokia looks intimidating, Pamela Jones at Groklaw discovered that many appeared to be duplicates except for the country of filing; and even within a single country (e.g. the U.S.), some appeared to be overlapping. In other words, there may be far fewer distinct patented issues than what appears on Nokia's IETF form. Thom Holwerda at OSNews also weighed in, recalling another case where sweeping patent claims by Qualcomm and Huawei against the Opus open source audio codec proved to be groundless FUD. The familiar name Florian Mueller pops up again in Holwerda's article."
Thanks Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for the nostalgia and for reviving SCO in the guise of Nokia. It was nice of you to dig out Florian for a reprise too...
You don't say? (Score:5, Insightful)
So when it comes time for MS to dish out more FUD Florian shows up? What a fucking surprise.
Re:Is VP8 still relavant? (Score:5, Insightful)
They still charge for the encoder.
Because VP8 is good enough and FREE, is why the big hassle is there. Giving up some performance to get out from under the MPEG-LA's thumb is well worth it.
It's about locking out or controlling production (Score:5, Insightful)
They still have their palms out if you want to encode video for public consumption. It isn't about screwing the consumer so much as preventing the consumer from becoming a producer.
Re:Is VP8 still relavant? (Score:4, Insightful)
MPEG-LA made a binding agreement that licensing of H.264 decoders would be free forever. They have already said that agreement would also apply to H.265, which is due to be formalized soon. VP8 is only about as efficient as H.264, H.265 is considerably more efficient.
The push for VP8 started when MPEG-LA wanted to charge a fee for licensing the decoder. It's now several years after that became a dead issue. The state of the art of video encoding has moved far past VP8. Why spend so much time and effort on an outdated codec?
They still charge for encoding. Perhaps more importantly, do you think that they made H.264 decoding free out of the goodness of their good little hearts, or because Google called their bluff?
Re:It's about locking out or controlling productio (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't about screwing the consumer so much as preventing the consumer from becoming a producer.
And controlling the playback devices, and therefore the means of production and distribution in the video arena.
Re:It's about locking out or controlling productio (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's my problem: because H.264 is a patented technology, you can't use it without the permission of the patent holders. So maybe today they are charging a couple of pennies per individual video, but how can I trust that this won't go up significantly tomorrow?
My understanding is that the H.264 patents won't expire until somewhere around 2027 or so. That is a long time to be at the mercy of patent holders.
Also, the technology being patented is a problem for free software projects like Firefox. I would like to see at least one video codec with acceptable performance that free software can use freely. Even if H.264 was licensed free-as-in-beer, there are restrictions on it that make it impossible for free software projects to use.
Google's lawyers spent a long time looking over VP8 before Google tried to set it free. So far no challenges to VP8 have really succeeded (MPEG-LA got some money, but failed to stop VP8 or get royalties, and that really must be considered a failure for MPEG-LA). I'm hoping and expecting that this challenge will, in the end, not succeed either.
If I'm right, what happens? Then VP8 becomes a free, lower-performing alternative to H.264. H.264 retains its status as the favorite codec at Apple, all those mobile devices still have H.264 built-in, and MPEG-LA can still collect the royalties. As you noted in your post, the royalties are not unreasonable.
It will be a similar situation as Vorbis and MP3. I consider Vorbis to be a success; it didn't kill MP3, but it did provide a useful alternative, and it kept the MP3 royalties from getting completely crazy. (Vorbis is actually technically superior to MP3, so I once had hopes it might "win" but it never happened.) I expect a similar story from VP8: it will never displace H.264 as the top format, and years from now people will sneer at it for "failing" to do so... but it will give Google and other companies a bargaining chip when MPEG-LA tries to raise royalties too much. They can make a serious threat to migrate their business away from H.264 and to VP8 if the royalties go too high.
If H.264 really was the only game in town, the industry would have to pay whatever rates MPEG-LA chose to set. And in the end, that means the consumers would pay.