At the end of last week, the MPEG-LA consortium announced they were extending the arrangement whereby they allow ‘web uses’ of the patents reading on the H.264 standard that they administer for their members to be licensed without charge. The arrangement, which runs in five-year periods, has now been extended to the expiration of the [...]
Filed under: Open Source, Patents | Tagged: Firefox, Google, Mozilla Foundation, MPEG LA, Streaming media, WebM | 2 Comments »
I’m delighted to say that Google has responded and fixed the licence for WebM so that they don’t need to submit it to OSI any more – they are now just using a BSD licence with a separate patent grant. Read more over on my ComputerWorldUK blog.
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: Google, OSI, WebM | 2 Comments »
An analysis of WebM and its patent risk Carlo demonstrates that On2 must clearly have analysed the patent context for VP8 since so many of the “sub-optimal choices” called out by H.264 partisans reflect avoidance of patented ideas. This lends weight to Google’s confidence over WebM, as well as highlighting the way software patents hinder [...]
Filed under: Links | Tagged: WebM | 4 Comments »
The announcement last week at Google IO of the creation of the WebM project and the release of the VP8 codec was a positive and welcome development, finally offering an alternative to the royalty-liable H.264 and to Theora. WebM arises from Google’s purchase of ON2 last year and had been widely anticipated. Google did their [...]
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK, WebM | 1 Comment »
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