[ale] the future of video codecs [was: Re: video software programming jobs (MPEG? H.264?)]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg at fifthhorseman.net
Sat Jan 10 11:24:38 EST 2009


On 01/10/2009 03:12 AM, aaron wrote:
> The main Fraud part is where they fly in the face of reason to argue
> that the public compression formats are proprietary even though Xiph.org
> does not hold any patent claims on their publicly published, Open Source
> specifications and has no way to control or influence their  
> implementation.

My understanding is that Xiph *does* hold patent claims on Theora (it
was descended from the patented VP3, which was given to Xiph by On2).
However, they've granted the public a non-revokable, royalty-free
license to those claims, but i'm unable to find a link to the specifics.

Given the current patent regime, holding these defensive patents is
comparable to holding the copyright which permits them to grant the BSD
license to everyone, AIUI.  IANAL, though.

And if anyone has a way to control and influence the implementation of
the theora standard, it most certainly is Xiph.  However, their
mechanism for doing this is based on their trusted social position, and
they can't use the courts to stop other groups from trying to influence
the standard in other directions.

Your point that fears of submarine patents should apply equally to
proprietary codecs as they do to theora is a good one.

> Since the final W3C recommendations are an open issue, I think it quite
> valid to promote the Ogg Vorbis / Theora web media standards as inevitable.
> In the face of all the corporate FUD mongering, it might give them a  
> fair chance of becoming the public standards that we so desperately need.

While i'd like to see imagine these formats as inevitable, i wouldn't
want to give anyone the mistaken impression that we can stop fighting
for them.  Others in this thread have already pointed out the dominance
of proprietary formats in non-internet video distribution schemes.

I think the issues in this struggle are complicated and important enough
that it's more valuable to have sober and clear assessments of what's
happening and what's at stake than it is to produce rhetoric which could
be seen as misleading.

In solidarity,

	--dkg

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