- From: David Singer <singer@apple.com>
- Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 14:52:00 +0100
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
- Cc: Joe D Williams <joedwil@earthlink.net>, robert@ocallahan.org, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, public-html@w3.org
At 15:14 -0700 2/07/09, Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >On Jul 2, 2009, at 2:50 PM, Doug Schepers wrote: > >> >> >>As I understand it, Apple and Nokia are among the chief patent >>holders for H.264. I'm sure it's naive of me, but can't Apple >>approach MPEG-LA to reexamine the costs and benefits of having the >>H.264 decoder available under a Royalty Free license for both >>desktop and mobile implementations of HTML5 (and SVG)? Ideally, >>this would also apply to the encoder for authoring tools, but I >>know that might be a harder sell. Perhaps smaller patent holders >>could be persuaded that it's in their financial interest to sell >>their IP rights, and the cost could be absorbed by the browser >>vendors and/or a grassroots funding campaign? (I know I'd donate!) > >My understanding (not very well-informed) is that the idea of a >royalty-free baseline profile for H.264 has been floated within the >MPEG-LA, and not all patent holders agreed. I wouldn't expect either >Apple or Nokia to be among the holdouts, but I don't know anything >about the details of these discussions. I have heard that at least >some of the holdouts have patents that expire sooner than others in >the pool. Indeed, Nokia and Apple were among the more active supporters of this concept. Unfortunately, it wasn't clear that we succeeded, and Apple decided we needed Main profile anyway, and would therefore need a license, so once we had a license we were not in a position to find out whether we truly needed it for baseline. -- David Singer Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.
Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 13:53:25 UTC