But the group says it isn't acting to kill a competitor. It said it's simply offering a service for patent holders and is agnostic about which video format prevails. "We are effectively a convenience store" for licensing patents, said Larry Horn, MPEG LA's chief executive. "We have no dog in that fight."
So, MPEG LA has no interest in extracting maximum possible amount of royalties for its patent holders?
If you keep reading, it's clear that MPEG-LA believes it has patents in the portfolio that cover VP8. If they expect to extract licensing revenue from those patents it's altogether possible that they don't care which format ultimately wins.
Well, that claim is completely disingenuous. In reality MPEG-LA oversees licensing for a set of known codecs, the most prominent being H.264. When a somewhat-viable competitor comes to town they just claim they own the competitor and therefore don't even need to compete. Behind the "we're impartial" facade what they're really saying is, "you're going to have to pay us anyway, so why not just use H.264 instead?"
(By the way, I voted you up, I think you summarize their position better than I did.)
Actually Mr Horn, who is a lawyer, is very careful never to say that. He does regularly get quoted as saying things are covered by patents, but never says who they belong to.
I'm astonished that he might actually be talking about Google's own patents, knowing that he'll be quoted by the press in a way that turns a true, but pointless statement into FUD. Since most of his quotes sound like a Dickensian bad guy I think he might just be doing this. I mean who talks like this:
"In view of the marketplace uncertainties regarding patent licensing needs for such technologies, there have been expressions of interest from the market urging us to facilitate formation of licenses that would address the market's need for a convenient one-stop marketplace alternative to negotiating separate licenses with individual patent holders in accessing essential patent rights for VP8 as well as other codecs, and we are looking into the prospects of doing so."
I'm not an MPEG-LA booster by any means (was involved with VP8) but for the sake of clarity, they can't and don't charge arbitrary royalties. The agreement for being involved in H.264 was to provide a license under "RAND" terms, meaning Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory.
What that means in practice is that you cannot charge Apple $1 per copy and Google $10 just because you hate Google. You have to have terms that apply to everyone equally, and they have to be 'reasonable', which presumably 100% of your gross revenue would not be.
That said, I do believe the patent holders have the right to circumvent the pool and cross-license directly from each other. I'm not too clear on how that relates to the RAND policy, but my cynical guess would be that it can be used as cover for some pretty sweet deals.
While RAND terms are generally better than having Microsoft or Apple able to pull the rug out from under you at any time, they are very specific in what they mean by "reasonable" and "non-discriminatory".
The most obvious example of this is that it's not "reasonable" to charge usage royalties on FLOSS software. There is a school of thought that flat-rate royalties don't clash as badly since you don't need to track usage, but since we're talking about standards produced for the public good, obviously royalty-free would be better. Either way, by assuming and enforcing a business model from the hardware days, it is "discriminating" against certain busineses.
Similarly, they've dropped charges on free web video, which is a clear attempt to break into a market they've had trouble in before. So as a class of users at least they can charge you more if they think they can get away with it.
Finally, it appears that the (highly successful) video game industry thinks that royalties designed for the TV industry aren't particularly reasonable for them and so avoids MPEG audio and video formats whenever possible.
So while they perhaps made sense 20, or even 10, years ago, RAND terms are no longer RAND.
This isn't the case. See the HP and MPEG-LA testimony before the FTC.
The pool agreement isn't exclusive. The members are free to license their patents through other venues, including cross licensing.
In fact, one of the points MPEG-LA made in their initial review letter with the DOJ is that he pool would not be used to force anyone to pay for a license to a patent which they were already licensed for some other means.
So a pool member only has to pay royalties iff they've been unable to achieve complete cross-licensing with the other pool members.
That is not clear from the article. Their representatives said that they believe that there are patents that cover vp8, but they never said they control those patents or which patents those are.
At another place the article says that mpeg-la is asking people to submit patents that cover vp8 in order to form another patent pool. So it seems that they may not have the patents that cover vp8 but want other companies to give them to them.
But probably they aren't really 100% sure their patents will hold up against the scale of legal challenge that could be brought down by Google. Of course, they have 1700 of them so they could keep the legal trouble going indefinitely.
It would certainly be easier for them if the Google and the world continued to just cut them checks for ancient technology. But it will never be to their advantage to admit the extent to which they are bluffing and they probably don't even know themselves.
Video has been digitized and compressed for how many decades now?
Instead of the government investigating the MPEG LA for anti-trust violations, how about they spend some time fixing the patent system. This whole h.264/VP8 brouhaha is a symptom, not the disease.
Let's remember that different actors in the government have their own motivations. Investigating the MPEG LA is a DOJ issue. The DOJ's full of long-term government employees who are motivated by their own career metrics.
Fixing the patent system will require legislation, which is a function of our elected officials. These officials, really (and tragically) by necessity at this point, are driven by funding their re-election campaign.
MPEG LA exists to extract patent royalties. By patent terms they are a 'legitimate' monopoly as the patent system was created to allow an inventor a temporary monopoly over their technology (20 yrs) on the condition that it passes to the public domain after that.
Given the early MPEG patents are in the mid - 90s they will begin to start expiring in 2015. Once we reach 2021 there will be a dozen free codecs with source code on the market.
In the meantime, MPEG LA does what it can to maximize its revenues.
While patents do confer a form of monopoly protection to an inventor and their assignees, that does not give anyone the right to form a cartel of multiple patent holders who work in concert to fix the price for the combined product.
MPEG-LA's workaround for that, which is what is at stake here, is some sort of carve-out with the FTC, stipulating that because it's an emerging standard, MPEG should not be subject to the normal restrictions on patent pooling.
I'm pretty firmly on WebM's side in this whole patent flame war thing, but getting the Justice Department looking into MPEG-LA already just makes me think Google's got some damn good lobbyists in Washington. I never heard of the government getting involved at this early stage of a patent battle before.
Of course, MPEG protection racket-esque comments in the article makes this a bit easier to swallow.
MPEG-LA asked the DOJ for clearance before they set up, since patent cartels of that type had been busted under anti-trust legislation in the past.
They made some concessions to the DOJ in order to be able to operate, which at least one licencee claims they've failed to honor. You can Google for the Nero AG vs MPEG-LA antitrust case for more info. (edit: a link, http://www.osnews.com/story/23346/Nero_Files_Antitrust_Case_...)
So it makes perfect sense for the DOJ to be involved. It's not just a patent dispute.
I guess even Google would be pissed if an investment of 125M was to be flushed down the toilet. Also, I'm pretty sure they had far-reaching strategy right from the beginning, and had prepared themselves for such issues that might eventually leading them into battle.
It's a win/win for Google. The long game is this: either they win the fight outright and webM becomes the video standard, or they use webM and the specter of long, drawn-out (and expensive) litigation to force MPEG-LA to rethink their royalty policy.
"I can tell you: VP8 is not patent-free," Mr. Horn said. "It's simply nonsense."
These statements are conscience injections, red herrings, and convenient sound bites for zealots like Gruber to use in their "see I told you" agenda-driven opinion pieces. Truth is, patents for a video codec to be used on the web is simply nonsense. It's a stifle of creativity and hopefully we end up winning with a free, open codec that can be used in open source software. This is the formula that encourages innovation.
H.264 hardware inconveniences, gripes - to the wind.
I think you gravely misunderstand the patent system. When you can get a patent on drawing a line onto the screen (http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=KYwhAAAAEBAJ&dq=r...), it means that anything in your codec might be patented by some ridiculous patent already.
So might your own proprietary software. And the Pope might be an axe murderer. A very large number of things might be true. Singling out this software as particularly hazardous because of mights smacks of FUD.
If you walk across a minefield, you might step on a mine. Singling out minefields as particularly hazardous because of mights smacks of FUD.
Joking aside, this is a false dilemma. Patent trolls actually exist, inadvertent patent infringement is not some purely hypothetical risk. Particularly in fields like video codecs where the mines are laid especially thick.
If you walk across a minefield, you are walking into a place where there are proven to be mines in your likely path. That's a much more present danger than the mere possibility of a mine's existence. A minefield verifiably has mines, not just might have mines, and thus walking in an arbitrary path there has a measurable chance of blowing you up (and there might be some specific paths with a 0% chance of blowing you up, which are also different from the minefield in general).
In spite of this supposed huge vulnerability, nobody has ever suggested even one single patent that could potentially be read as covering anything in Google's WebM tech, much less the "minefield" that MPEG-LA try to conjure up with their vague insinuations. You'd be about as well-supported by the evidence if you claimed that God just hates WebM and will smite down anyone who uses it to encode video.
I'm not saying that WebM isn't on a patent minefield. I can't prove that negative claim. But I can say that I've never seen anyone offer any credible evidence for this minefield.
WebM - free license, no guarantees of indemnification
H.264 - paid license, no guarantees of indemnification
Any argument that circumvents the above fact is agenda-driven. People know that WebM is the better choice; but are instead trying to find a roundabout way of keeping their H.264 encoders relevant.
One of the main tenets of reasoning for Flash being a proprietary blackbox is because of its all-encompassing safety net for video, other codecs. No one wanted to hear about that, because at the end of the day people were concerned with their iOS battery life.
So excuse me if I, after finally abandoning Flash myself, feel this is quiet the hypocriticism of the open web movement. It again, seems like it's about battery life and very little to do with freedom of web technology.
And are you claiming that Google has no agenda? It might be one you support, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
No, I entirely anticipate an agenda - but that doesn't mean it exists. My hope is that Google will do the right thing and offer indemnification. Hoping doesn't do anything, of course, but neither does propping up the MPEG LA's argument of what ifs.
Google offers free services and tools of all kinds, so to single out WebM is highly agenda-driven, IMO.
Disclosure: I own a MBA, PC, iPhone, iPad and work on a iMac at my office. I don't own a single Google hardware product.
Sorry - we crossed over - I deleted my original while you were writing this.
Honestly though the points you make here don't seem to have a lot to do with the question.
If Google is going to make claims that things are open, they should be held up to scrutiny. If they are not, then we simply collude with them in weakening the term.
Google claims that a highly complicated piece of code that does pretty much the same thing as another highly complicated piece of code covered by 1700 patents does is patent free and safe to use.
They want other people to stake their money on testing this claim.
"Google offers free services and tools of all kinds, so to single out WebM is highly agenda-driven, IMO."
By that argument, any discussion of individual Google products would be "agenda driven". That's absurd.
They want other people to stake their money on testing this claim.
This is why I believe these rants about WebM are agenda-driven. Who says Google wants people to front the responsibility? This is your claim. I don't think Google bought WebM for the purpose of screwing the implementors. That doesn't mean I think we're all safe, it just means we need more information before jumping to conclusions. It also does not mean we should use WebM without discretion.
By that argument, any discussion of individual Google products would be "agenda driven". That's absurd.
It's absurd to disregard that out of all the possible Google technologies (maps, android, API), WebM is considered most harmful. Especially since most who share this vision are Apple users (again, so am I). I can't ignore the obvious, stitched together, lop-sided point of view.
In case you hadn't noticed this is a thread about the MPEG-LA and WebM. Saying that discussing WebM here is evidence of some kind of weird agenda is crazy talk.
No. There is a difference between debate and suppression. I'm fine with highlighting WebM's faults - but not creating them out of thin air for what appears to be nothing more than a red herring, to vilify WebM with intentions that Google may or may not have.
For WebM to be a free equivalent, Google would have to indemnify users against that list of patents. If Google is sure that the patents are not infringed, why doesn't it at least do that?
Whats the point of paying for MPEG-LA's license for AVC if doing so doesn't actually make the format legal to use?
Both sides are saying (if not expressly then implied) that their licensing technique is believed to be enough, but they can't promise absolute protection.
The point of paying for the license is that you get the right to use all of the patents in the collection in one step rather than having to negotiate more than a thousand separate licenses. Even if you have to deal with other patents later this is still valuable.
Both sides are simply not saying the same thing. You are putting words into their mouth to make it look as though the MPEG-LA is saying the same as Google.
I think an unencumbered format would be a good thing, and I'm asking a genuine question. Why is Google making a claim they aren't prepared to back up? Why should other people take the risk for them?
Perhaps there's a good reason for this strategy. I can't see it, so I'm asking if anyone else can?
Saying "the other side is just as bad" is uninformative and just turns the discussion into a question of who's side you're on.
Remember that just the idea of a plugin, ActiveX object or layer that communicates with one tech to another is a patent infringement - and yet we are now coming to a point where the open web is embraced over the patent-encumbered.
Apple's camp will talk shit about Flash and how Flash should die because it's patent encumbered, but because iOS has a hardware H.264 encoder suddenly the rules don't apply and it's just fine to be presenting junk science as reasoning so long as its convenient.
You're spending more time trying to convince people to give up the idea of a truly open format instead of just conceding that it's an absolute necessity. Patent trolls might... is not a good reason to give up a necessary measure of innovation.
I'd still be on WebM's side regardless, but I feel like if the tables were turned and WebM was Apple's idea, this conversation would be going a little differently.
You're projecting. The objection to Flash has never really been that it's patent-encumbered. They care that it's a closed specification without any good open-source implementations, which means Adobe totally controls the experience, and Adobe has traditionally crafted a pretty terrible experience. That's the objection. It's not about patents — it's about the difficulty of creating a good user experience around it.
Granted. I know very little about patents, I still see these loaded statements as conscience injections, red herrings, and convenient sound bites for zealots like Gruber. Might is different that is, but on Gruber's blog it's a testament to an agenda. The MPEG LA knows this.
There is no doubt in my mind that someone has a registered patent that the VP8 codec infringes on, due to the terrible state of the patent system as a whole. Now whether that is a valid patent is something that lawyers and lots of money will determine. However, someone needs to front that money, and AFAIK Google isn't providing patent indemnity for using the codec. It really is a smart business move to pay the relatively small license fee to MPEG LA than risk losing your entire company to a lawsuit (or lawyer fees)
If you really believe the patent system is that bad, then it's just as likely that a rogue patent reads on H.264. Although popularly believed, the MPEG-LA doesn't provide patent indemnity for H.264 so you can pay the small licence fee and still lose your entire company in a lawsuit.
Well the odds are somewhat high that if one has a patent on something in h.264, they would have joined the consortium and gotten royalties for it already. Plus there are a lot of patents that already exist in the patent pool that MPEG-LA has, which is indirectly what the MPEG-LA guy is saying, that one of them probably infringes.
My head hurt after going through one software patent trying to figure out what it actually meant. I can't imagine cross referencing every single patent against everything that WebM does.
WebM is an inferior codec to h264. As much as I'd like a patent-free alternative, it's unlikely that consumers will be willing to take a step back in video compression/quality. The fact of the matter is that large companies can afford to pay royalties, and end users don't have to. There's very little incentive to move to something new, let alone inferior in quality and of dubious future.
Now imagine a patent-free codec came along that had substantially better quality per bit-rate and was at least as efficient as h264. You wouldn't need lobbying to move us over. The pirates would embrace it first, and everyone else would follow. At the end of the day, moving forward is the only way we know. Sadly, WebM is leading in the opposite direction.
One of the most important properties of my media formats is it's accessiblility.
The fact that h264 is heavily patented by these creeps makes it inferior for my purposes by a large measure.
What business wouldn't pay a slight file-size penalty (to maintain the same quality) in order avoid being bound to some per-seat licensing agreement with all its associated administrative and reporting obligations?
Drive space is most-rapidly-decreasing cost in the world and bandwidth isn't too bad either. Patents take twenty years to expire. Do the math.
"One of the most important properties of my media formats is it's accessiblility."
Great! H264 is what you want then. It's not only supported, but also hardware accelerated, on most devices out there. WebM isn't, and won't be for a long time.
"What business wouldn't pay a slight file-size penalty (to maintain the same quality) in order avoid being bound to some per-seat licensing agreement with all its associated administrative and reporting obligations?"
Every business that would rather pay royalty fees than for extra bandwidth required by a shitty codec. You probably also want the majority of your customers to actually be able to view your content. So there's also that "minor" inconvenience. But aside from that, what business wouldn't go the WebM route, right? :P
Every business that would rather pay royalty fees than for extra bandwidth required by a shitty codec.
Seriously, how much of a bandwidth increase are you alleging for a similar quality?
Great! H264 is what you want then. It's not only supported, but also hardware accelerated, on most devices out there. WebM isn't, and won't be for a long time.[...]You probably also want the majority of your customers to actually be able to view your content. So there's also that "minor" inconvenience.
Device adoption is certainly a good point. Based on the viewing habits I see of the kids, over the long term I'd bet on whatever YouTube is moving to over whatever remnants of IP the old television industry is trying to keep restricted.
> it's unlikely that consumers will be willing to take a step back in video compression/quality
If mp3 is anything to go by consumers as a whole actually seem to care surprisingly little about the quality / size equation. I suspect if either 10% more bandwidth is used or video is 10% worse the vast bulk of users couldn't give a hoot for the vast bulk of video they view on the web. There might be special cases (streaming HD movies, perhaps), but we don't need the general standard for web video to cater to every special case, just be good enough and robust enough for a wide variety of common cases.
Actually, mp3 is widely used because that's what the pirates chose back in the dial up days, when a lossy codec met their needs perfectly. You might still remember a time when mp3 was not supported by many players.
H264 meets the pirates' needs perfectly now. It has the best quality per bit-rate out there. And pirates don't care about royalty fees.
All your arguments below, about WebM not being supported and hardware accelerated on every device, apply equally to your hypothetical better than H.264 codec. So it's a bit simplistic to say only quality matters, and Google's has created more hardware (and software) support for WebM than I thought possible.
It's likely that getting that support was aided by being clearly patent-free so certain compression techniques and wide support are probably linked.
Of course, a better than H.264 codec isn't hypothetical. THere is H.265 and VP9 coming, neither of which has hardware support or patent royalty demands or wide usage by pirates. The level of support for VP8 is likely to influence how those things pan out in the future.
Yes all my arguments apply to my hypothetical codec. Where did I imply otherwise?
If you want your codec to be adopted despite lack of hardware/software support, you really need to offer something worth the hassle. Notably reduced buffering wait times for consumers, and lower bandwidth costs and ease of distribution (encoder/decoder) for pirates would be such needs worth the hassle. WebM is worse in all these cases. Very few people care about royalties, so it's simply not enough to ask everyone to swap out all the hardware and other infrastructure for mostly ideological fluff.
You actually need to make a better codec. And so far there is nothing out there (H265 and VP9 don't have a usable encoder/decoder).
My point was that Google is providing the software and hardware support[1], in conjunction with every big name you could mention, with a short list of notable exceptions, therefore overall it is as strong as another hypothetical royalty-free codec which is technically better, but which has less hardware, software or industry support.
In short "better" codec means more than just compression efficiency and asking people to switch out their infrastructure for a quality improvement is as tough as for a cost reduction. It only happens now because the whole industry acts in concert to make it happen. There's no reason why the industry couldn't coalesce around a free codec next time if the "idealogues" and "hippies" have laid sufficient groundwork, either with no business case or one that only works in certain niches. This is how it has worked in many other free software or free content success story.
[1] this doesn't seem to be widely known. If you google for WebM then one of the twitter results is Joe Hewitt asking smugly when Google will announce hardware and Youtube support for WebM, something they'd done about a year previously.
There's an implicit "yet" in my sentence that I should probably have put in. As in, the MPEG(-LA) plans for H.265 to be widely supported (by hardware manufacturers, pirates, and everyone else) and plan to charge royalty fees on it. But widespread use of VP8 and a credible threat from VP9 (or 10) could force them to choose between making money and being the defacto standard.
"Antitrust enforcers are investigating whether MPEG LA, or its members, are trying to cripple an alternative format called VP8 that Google released last year— by creating legal uncertainty over whether users might violate patents by employing that technology, these people added."
(Emphasis mine). This is fair, I think. Basically, they are being investigated for spreading FUD against their competitor.
Imagine that you developed an application, and I'm your competitor. You're trying to sell your app to corporations. I call journalist and tell them that your app infringes patents (not mine, I don't have any patents). I also tell them that the patent pool is being assembled. I put a notice on my website: "Do you have any patents that [you app] might infringe? Let us know!", and let it hang there for a long long time. While there's an uncertainty, corporations won't buy your app. Anticompetitive? To me, yes.
Patent enforcement is not illegal, but it is illegal to misuse a patent for anticompetitive purposes.
The area of law where patent law and anti-trust law intersect is very complex, so I cannot explain it here, but suffice it to say there are situations where patents can be misused for anticompetitive purposes and this can result in violation of antitrust law.
Some examples may include situations where you have a patent for system A that rightfully grants you a monopoly on system A, but use that patent to get a monopoly on or control the distribution of system B which is not covered by your patent.
This is something that may apply in this case although I am not sure it does. MPEG-LA keeps its major license agreements secret, so we do not know what is happening.
As someone else pointed out, the one thing that makes this interesting is, instead of bothering to do the legal legwork first to PROVE they cover vp8, they simply make vague threats to scare people out of using it, which I highly doubt is how the patent system was meant to be used.
Are vague threats illegal? Do legal threats have to be specific? It seems like one of the most common threats I know of is, "I'm going to sue you!" It's usually not a specific, "I'm going to sue you based on violation of XYZ". It's usually a very vague statement. Is that generally illegal, but just not enforced?
So, MPEG LA has no interest in extracting maximum possible amount of royalties for its patent holders?