- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:10:39 -0500
- To: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- CC: public-html@w3.org
On 2/3/10 4:40 PM, John Foliot wrote: > JF wonders aloud if this changes anything... > http://www.mpegla.com/main/Pages/Media.aspx I am not a patent lawyer, so I don't know. At least from Joe's perspective. From Youtube's perspective it probably means they can probably keep serving up H.264 without having to pay for said distribution until 2016. From Mozilla's perspective it doesn't change the issue of being able to ship a browser that other's can redistribute. Whether it changes the issue of people being able to put content on the web is identical to whether it changes things for Joe. Note that 2016 is significantly before all the H.264 patents expire, so even if that were accepted as the way to go right now, it would be worth putting effort into finding a successor that does not have quite as much ... uncertainty ... as H.264 (or Theora, in Apple's case). > And in case you've missed this: > http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/21/45 That seems like a reasonable summary of the current situation, yes. The future of the On2 codecs is one big question mark here, I think. Non-Google browser vendors' willingness to support them, obviously contingent on whatever the licensing terms happen to be, etc, is another. -Boris
Received on Wednesday, 3 February 2010 23:11:14 UTC