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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
[+] [-] mustpax|15 years ago|reply
So, MPEG LA has no interest in extracting maximum possible amount of royalties for its patent holders?
[+] [-] imbriaco|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinofcain|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lallysingh|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danbmil99|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sitmack|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kylekramer|15 years ago|reply
Of course, MPEG protection racket-esque comments in the article makes this a bit easier to swallow.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] VomisaCaasi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomlin|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fryguy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexkcd|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marshray|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zmmmmm|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wtn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchest|15 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] hristov|15 years ago|reply
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.
None of the above is legal advice.
[+] [-] marshray|15 years ago|reply
This looks to me like the patent system operating as designed.
I guess if you're Google you can get the government to make an exception for you in the interest of fairness.
But it's cold legalistic capitalism for the rest of us.
[+] [-] amitraman1|15 years ago|reply
Charge for encryption/licensing formats.