MPEG LA starts digging patent pool under Google's WebM - Page 3

Conjecture founded upon fantasy.

Maybe the patent system isn't the best way to protect IP and it is a mess, I agree. I have a friend who has an audio patent for his invention, pain in the a$$ situation, but at this stage of the game, while his patent was challenged by the trolls (who only had vaporware) and they sort of won because the judge was clueless, at least he had something as protection. Without it, no recourse at all.

You might find this article relevant:-

http://searchengineland.com/bing-why...usations-63279

Drones buzzing around honeycomb.

How original.




Chrome is BSD/GPL. The only part you can't take is the Google Chrome logo and trademark.


Perhaps the point is the quantity of "open" software vs. the quantity of use.



That "wide" range of codecs is anything MPEG, and 1394. For that matter, all the patents they already know about should be all they need to start a case against webm. Going out of your way to ask the world if you have a patent against another competing codec to come together so we can fight it just because it now is gaining momentum is quite trolling.



Sounds great in theory, but in practice it is a little more complicated than that. Submarine patents can be hidden for years until someone else makes a successful product, killing any profit to be made. The entire mobile industry is in a holdup due to all the stupid lawsuits filed.

Kinda hard to want to invent stuff when much more powerful people already will shoot you down.

We know, it's one of their methods of getting more relevant search results based on what their users browse.

Wholesale copying of search results would be obvious and therefore stupid to do.

Just because webm exists doesn't mean the end of h.264. I also fail to see your "horrible" when I have both examples of 720p material sitting right here. If by OGG you mean the audio portion vorbis consistently ties aac and is a little better at lower bitrates.

This is not true.

Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.

MPEG-LA is simply asking the people who are most familiar with their code to make an assessment of infringement. While MPEG-LA has plenty of lawyers and such, I doubt that have a full staff of engineers with access to the source code from their various members.

It's by definition patent trolling. Even your justification for it is EXACTLY what patent trolls do. Patent trolls buy up patents and make a business out of their "right to enforce their patents and find infringers".


Yeah, that must be it. I'm not going to list the things that I've done, but I'm a professional software developer that has to play the patent game myself. I've got patents with my name next to them, I ship software millions of people use.

I don't know if you're in the same boat, but your comment is not necessary, ignorant, and really just shows you've nothing valuable to contribute to the discussion.


The problem is the definition of "innovation". The vast majority of software patents are junk patents. They're not "innovation", they're just things someone gets around to doing first. I know this first hand.

I was speaking in the context of native browsers (hence the word "browsers", and not "plugins").

Google has already re-encoded YouTube into WebM. I used to work for a major source of videos in the Canadian market, and they're in the process of WebM-encoding now. It's trivial work to do when you already have the infrastructure, as most do. Other major providers like Vimeo and BrightCove have also already done it. It's not only not "highly unlikely", it's basically already done.

My comment is that if you take off the shelf browsers and use HTML5 video (NOT FLASH...I thought we all agreed Flash is awful?), WebM will be played from every browser (provided you have the free QT plugin on OS X and WMP Plugin on Windows). Firefox will never play h264 in HTML5.

As for the comments on WebM quality -- you guys should take a look at the git log of libvpx. There's been a phenomenal amount of work done in a short period of time to improve both the quality and the speed. Most of the problems with WebM quality (which are grossly overstated) are due to immature encoders. It's not really fair to evaluate the codecs themselves by comparing x264-encoded videos with libvpx-encoded videos, because x264 is excellent quality and has been refined over many years with massive quality improvements. libvpx hasn't had that time to mature yet, but it will.

Edit: Correction -- apparently MS has released a Firefox extension for Windows that'll enable h264 playback, but it's Windows only...and you need to install a FF extension.

And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?

Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."

How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.

Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.

Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."

MPEG-LA does, in fact, make it easy to pay their members money. But it would be far more cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive if licensees needed to deal with each patentholder separately. I am pretty sure you know this already.



MPEG-LA does not claim to own VP8 - they believe that VP8 includes infringing software.

As far as why now and not earlier, there are two reasons:

• However popular VP6 and other On2 codecs were, they were nearly invisible to the vast majority of computer users (so, not worth the time and effort)
• Google picked a fight by removing support for H.264

I doubt Google is really surprised by any of this. In fact, it is likely the reason they chose not to indemnify those who implemented VP8.

The MPEG-LA license is really pretty small - it seems the most anyone would pay would be $6.5M per year per product type. Someone like Apple likely pays the max for both the encoder/decoder in their OS as well as paying a separate fee for individual titles in iTunes. Google can certainly afford this, as well. It could hurt smaller developers and content providers but I am not feeling too sorry for Mozilla who has a lot of their bills paid by Google.

Neither Apple, Google or MPEG-LA made the rules; they are all simply playing by the rules as they exist. Well, Google is kind of hoping to skirt around the rules but now it appears that they will likely not succeed. If you want change, it's time to start contacting your elected officials.

I'm not sure how this plays out. Google could pay whatever licensing is determined which will most likely be reasonable and continue with VP8. I think the more likely outcome is that VP8 will die much as VC1 did.

Don't be fooled by Mueller, he LOVES software patents, his little disclaimer is a fraud.

One more thing...defenders of WebM forget that this whole bit of MPEG-LA checking out a competitor for patent violations has happened before. Microsoft developed VC-1 as an alternative to H.264 and offered it as an alternative for the potentially lucrative Blu-Ray market. They even offered it to standards bodies. Then the MPEG-LA looked at it and discovered that it was riddled with already used patents in the MPEG-LA patent pool.

Microsoft had a couple of choices. Either fight the MPEG-LA in court for years and suffer the real possibility of losing (and having to pay royalties and treble damages) or join the patent pool. In the end, they joined the patent pool and managed to get VC-1 approved as an alternate encoding standard for Blu-Ray anyway.

Microsoft chose the practical choice and it paid off for the industry. Microsoft makes no money off the patent pool when you subtract the royalties they have to pay. But the industry got a chance to move forward on one standard that is used EVERYWHERE. Web video? Check. Broadcast video? Check. Satellite video (including the satellites)? Yup. Mobile devices (phones, tablets). You bet. Military applications? Remember the Wikileaks video? Do you think it would have been easy to distribute to the press had it not been encoded in something they already knew how to play?

Google is betting on the might of its size and influence combined with the market dominance of Youtube to bring WebM to the forefront. The whole thing was a play to marginalize Apple and Microsoft in the mobile web video space. But the move pissed off nearly everyone who actually produces video content for a living since up until WebM, their job was a lot easier, especially with Flash video falling by the wayside.

What happens next should be interesting...

Not by it's existence, but everyone who thinks open source is more important than having code done right (i.e. swallowed Googles BS) is insisting it is going to be the standard codec. I was responding to the thinking that Webm will save us all. So, now all of us on the coding end have to work triple hard to basically serve up one video (encode in Ogg, WebM and H.264). Thanks a lot.

I tried encoding the Ogg/WebM versions with the same compression as I encoded the H.264, I do want to switch to html 5 video now, not later. I just couldn't get the quality to be as good at the same file size as the h.264 one. The videos were horribly obviously much lower quality. For the project I was working on, smallest file size was very important. With the H.264 version I got great quality and great compression. So now anyone viewing my websites with Firefox and Chrome will see the crappy quality video, so yes I have issues with that. And I have moved on from Flash, so the fallback for Flash in the html5 code is only for older browsers not modern browsers so it won't play the H.264 video via FLash Player with Firefox or Chrome.


Yes, but as I posted above, modern browsers will not play it by default in an html5 tag, it will serve up the video codec for the browser and not the Flash player even with the Flash fallback code, that is only for browsers that can't read html5 tags.

Billions of dollars worth of research and investment went into the work of h264. The innovators deserve to be compensated for their work.

Asking businesses and developers to work for free is not fair or moral especially when they have bills to pay and children to feed just like everyone else.

There is no such thing as a free lunch no matter what google tells you.

Thank you!! You said it much better than I did!

Without software patents, your friend wouldn't be sued by some vaporware patent troll in the first place. Think about that for a second.

Sure, other people might be able to copy what he did more easily, but he would also be free to incorporate other people's good idea in his own product. Then it all comes down to who did a better job integrating the features, and better at marketing. Much better system than submitting to the basically tech illiterate lawyers and judges.

Tell that to Nokia, at least one of the suits they lodged against Apple in the UK involves software.

But mathematical algorithms are patentable.

First of all, I don't believe software patents should exist. While I'm sure some software algorythms are truly innovative, there are just far too many one-click shopping patents out there. The US patent office is in a clear conflict-of-interest situation, because the more stupid patents they approve, the more money they make. Conversely, the less they look for prior art, the less cost they incur and the more money they make.

Having said that, all of the big industry players have agreed that software patents are among the rules of the game, and Google has decided its "above the law" in this respect, despite the fact that they've filed patents of their own.

The only way out of this mess is to abolish software patents. This way, no cross-licensing agreements need to exist, and Google will be on the same footing as everybody else, as opposed to trying to get a leg up.

How much money did Amazon spend developing one-click shopping? How much are they making in royalty payments? That sounds like a free lunch to me.

I can't say for sure because I'm not a patent lawyer, but I've read the WebM licensing terms, and they read something along the lines of 'taking part in or facilitating patent litigation against WebM', which in legalese could just as well imply that signing a cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA to ensure you can keep selling your VP8-based product would also mean that Google invalidates your WebM license. You _are_ 'facilitating' or 'taking part in' patent litigation if you would in that case, because by signing some cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA you'd basically admit VP8 infringes on H264 patents (why else would you negotiate with them in the first place)


You're missing the whole point behind a patent pool. The fact that almost every consumer-electronics and video giant in the world is part of the MPEG-LA means that no-one in their right mind will ever even think of suing them for patent infringement. The sheer amount of patents in the pool and the almost unlimited pockets of the patent holders would obliterate every other company that holds video encoding patents. I know it isn't pretty, but that's what patents and patent pools are for: to assure mutual destruction in case of a patent war. Why else do you think big companies like Microsoft and Apple build huge patent portfolios? They _know_ they infringe on each others patents, but they also know it is not in their best interest to start patent litigation against each other because it will boomerang back at them.


VP8 most definitely doesn't predate H264, the H264 standard evolved from earlier ITU standards and has been in development for 2 decades. It's also not true that VP8's main shortcoming is lack of B-frames, there are multiple other things stripped out from the codec to sidestep H264 patents (adaptive quantization comes to mind). Google for 'x264 vp8 analysis' to find an extremely detailed analysis of VP8 that clearly shows how VP8 is nothing more than 'H264 minus all the good stuff'.


You know I used to think the same a few years ago, until I started working for a company that built advanced software solutions that relied on interoperability with tools from other vendors. Copyright might be sufficient for closed and proprietary systems, but not for open standards such as H264. By publishing (or leaking) the specifications required to implement H264, you've basically given away everything. No-one even needs to reverse engineer anything at all, they can just implement the spec and profit from it as though they invented it themselves. That's what I meant when I said "if there's just one example where software patents make sense it would be video encoding". The world is not served by proprietary codecs that only work on some systems supported by the vendor, and it is also not served by a complete stalling of any investment or progress in the development of better video codecs.


H264 is neither 'math' nor 'software', it is a complete pipeline of multiple interconnected parts and technologies, some of which are specified using traditional math, some of which are specified as data interfaces, some of which are specified as (pseudo) code snippets. The specification is far more complex than just a few mathematical expressions or a few lines of code. If you really want to play the strawman card and point to the stupid patent office and how they should not grant software patents I know a few counter examples: H264 is a billion times more complex than a paperclip, a 3M post-it note, or the cover on your cup of starbucks coffee, yet those are all patented.


These are all interesting examples some of which are borderline trivial, but that's not the point. Like I said: the patent system _is_ rotten, it _is_ being abused, and there _are_ trivial patents and software solutions that should never ever have been patentable. That doesn't mean that there _are not_ software systems or solutions that _do_ deserve to be patentable, because they are non-trivial to invent, yet easy to reverse-engineer. That's what I mean with 'the world is not always black vs white or good vs evil', there are all kinds of shades of grey in between, and in my view, H264 is much closer to white than it is to black.

I don't think you understand what is going on. MPEG-LA is doing just what you suggest. It is asking it's members now if any of them think Google's format infringes their patents. If so, MPEG-LA wants to pool those patents together and offer licensing for the infringing patents BEFORE Google offers the format. In other words, BEFORE Google's format becomes entrenched. Seems fair to me.

Anyone who didn't see this coming is stupid with a capital G.

You seem to think that patents stifle competition. That's completely false. Let's say someone patents something. Others can't produce that thing. However, say those "others" have the drive to beat the dude who has the patent. The others will focus their energies on creating something better than the patented thing.

Google was hypocritical because by their own methodology they PROVED MS didn't copy Google search results. Google paid it's own employees wages to feed biased signal data into Microsoft search signals via IE searches on bogus Google planted topics. If Google hadn't had it's own employees do 10's of thousands of searches on those bogus searches during the two week period they "stung" MS, MS would have never registered the search algorithm signal on the bogus items.

You read that? Google didn't only create the bogus items, they paid their own employees to figure out how MS ranked things via the IE search history, and then actively and explicitly fed mass amounts of "fake data" into that signal channel. Why do you think the controversy died so fast? A couple folks called Google on it, and they realized after the fact they busted themselves by their own methodology.


On a separate but related note, go ahead and be uncomfortable about MS using the search field they way they do. That is a bit creepy and underhanded, but it never resulted and couldn't have resulted in MS copying Google search results. It only resulted in MS being told in that creepy manner that those odd Google pages existed and should be indexed because lots of searches for them implied they were interesting.

You don't address the issue. A video format can be made up of many patentable ideas. Such formats are complex. For instance, Mpeg-2 is covered by 39 different US patents. So, while it may be the case that WebM brought some unique patentable ideas to the table, that doesn't mean it doesn't also infringe on other patents. I am not an expert on the topic, but there are many good articles by experts on the Internet. One Steve Jobs allegedly pointed to. Most experts think WebM operates in a way that is uncomfortably similar to the way the video formats managed by MPEG-LA. If Google were comfortable with WebM being unhindered by others patents, it would indemnify users. It is choosing not to do so.

I am not rooting for MPEG-LA. I think our patent system stinks. I just find that Google is hypocritical and it's motives have to be suspect. It touts openess on one hand, and then accuses Microsoft of stealing its search results. Further, Google has publicly stated it is investing no resources into improving WebM. That is tragic being that the format needs a lot of work to be near as functional as H-264. Moreover, it says it wants to only support open standards, but has embraced Flash lovingly.

It is better to work with the devil you know then the devil you don't. Google's move brings uncertainty to online video. Companies like Apple don't want to be forced to supporting WebM because it opens them up to patent lawsuits. With H-264, they might have to pay a licensing fee, but it is reasonable and that is better then worrying about patent liability from a shaky format that Google is merely offering so that it can save some money and control licensing.

Bingo, you nailed it. Microsoft asked its IE users for permission to index their web browsing activity, which of course is going to include some Google search results. That is one factor of many that Microsoft claims it uses in coming up with search results. Google gamed Microsoft's system. First, Google opted for its employees to allow Microsoft to index their browsing habits. Second, Google created some obscure of the wall searches that Google's employees repeatedly feed into Internet Explorer. Third, no other users on the internet were making those same searches, so Microsoft's normal algorithms couldn't come up with any results for this whacky search requests. Yet, because Google's employees feed IE these phony search results, Microsoft search engine did notice some people on IE were making searches using the bogus search. When it's other criteria failed, Microsoft gave Google's employees the only results it had, namely those from Google's IE users who opted into Microsoft's voluntary indexing system.

I personally think Microsoft's method is smart. Further, Google's Chrome does the same thing. Just Google's Chrome doesn't ask permission.

google IS the new evil. they want everything for free! they take all our data for free and then turn around and use it to make billions - they are the whores of the internet.

Well, patents are important, but as they work in the US it gets wrong. And this is not only in software. So to get this right, you have to broaden the discussion a bit and also include the American legal system. I won't try to explain, but the legal system in the US has a few things not really working for anybody else but the lawyers.

??? I have no idea what you are trying to say here. I didn't even mention or discuss the history of the internet or computer hardware or software and yet you claim I revised it. Please explain.

Let's attack rather than compete. What a great move...

You mentioned there would be no innovation without software patents. Since there were no software patents when the internet was invented.

Just think if someone patented the internet...... You would have to pay every time you coded a website. Software patents are a joke and the argument behind them is completely false.

Sorry idiot but you are still using webkit when you open safari - ie you ARE using open source software. The proprietary bit is just a front end and a javascript engine. WEBKIT IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT YOU USE EVERYTIME YOU OPEN SAFARI.

And like I said, the majority of times you visit a website you are using open source software since you are calling the open source software on the server. I am sure you agree that more websites are accessed everyday than any other piece of software apart from OSs themselves. So how the hell can you imply open source is tiny and unimportant?

I see that logic isn't your strong point.

The overwhelming majority of web sites are accessed via proprietary software. The fact that the proprietary software has some open source code inside is a red herring. People buy and use proprietary software vastly more than they 'buy' and use open source software.

The point that escapes you open source nazis is that developers have a choice. They are free to write open source software if they wish and they are free to write commercial and/or proprietary software if they wish. You seem to think that you have a right to take away the proprietary option and leave them only the option to use open source.

Great idea - let's extend that to the work place. You presumably work for a living at a job you get paid for (ignoring the more likely scenario that you're a pre-teen living in Mommy and Daddy's house). You also have the option to volunteer your time to various charities. I think that volunteering your time is a good thing - and companies shouldn't be able to make a profit off of the sweat of their employees, so I think there should be a new rule that EVERYONE must work as a volunteer and not have a paid job. After all, your work should be free for everyone to benefit from at no charge.

Sex is essential for men. So going by Google's logic no women should be protected by law if a man wants to have sex with her. Sex should be open and free. Every man's daughter or wife should be open to any other man who wants to have sex with her. So also with patents. Patents should be free and should not be encumbered with protection of the law. With this kind of logic, it would be a matter of time before America got itself shafted from behind.

Can you please provide a source for this? My guess is no.

not true. look up the 'Wright Brothers' and read about patents they held.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wri...ers_patent_war


same with automobiles. look up henry ford vs selden

If they are serious about making a free codec, no one can stop them, they just have to not use technology owned by anyone. As with everything in life you can get a good job done by a professional, but they will expect to be paid, or you can take the el-cheapo route. In this case the el-cheapo route means your file sizes are bigger and your images are lower quality.