Rob Sayre's Mozilla Blog

8 Responses to “mmm, fud”

1. Jakub Nesetril Says:
   July 3rd, 2009 at 12:42 am

   FUD? Really?

   The way I read it, the email was suggesting independent patent review was a good idea that might sway other players to be more supportive.

2. Victor Bogado Says:
   July 3rd, 2009 at 2:33 am

   @Maciej I’m suprised at the level of confidence expressed in whatever coded not infringing unknown patents…

   This problem is not more likely to happen on theora than in any other codec,

3. Robert Kaiser Says:
   July 3rd, 2009 at 3:46 am

   I wonder how they think that Theora should infringe any “submarine” patents that wouldn’t affect other codecs. We don’t have any known patents it violates, and from all we know the ground on “submarine” patents must be quite level ground for all codecs – and I’m pretty sure there’s more money to be made with claims against codecs that actually make licensing money.

4. dave Says:
   July 3rd, 2009 at 5:14 am

   I was going to make the same comment as Robert Kaiser but to go into more detail:

   Theora was recently described by proponent (roughly) as “a subset of H.264″, basically any patented technique it infringes, and in particular any core concept that can’t be easily worked around, is going to be shared by H.264 and other codecs with similar theoretical backgrounds.

   The patent threat then falls into three pieces:

   1) stuff that threatens codecs that are already widely used by the biggest and richest companies in the world, (notably including Apple)
   2) obscure stuff that only Theora uses (which could be worked around)
   3) being sued by the patent holders of the MPEG-LA

   Given that last item, it’s rather ominous for representatives of exactly such a member to be making what could be interpreted as threats.

   I don’t mean to be too harsh on Apple or its employees. Reading between the unnecessarily secretive lines it seems they may be trying to get one of the lower quality profiles of H.264 made royalty-free but are meeting resistance from other MPEG-LA members. I seem to recall a similar standoff around AAC licensing terms in the past.

   But, their representatives on the mailing list seem to be churning out reasons to support the current Apple line that simply don’t stand up to scrutiny, or in this particular case take on ominous overtones, probably accidental but still based on their lack of understanding of the situation and latching onto buzzwords and memes.

   (I am not a lawyer etc.)

   Also, has anyone asked Apple and Google exactly what their respective licences for H.264 allow the end user to do? I believe the Adobe Flash licence only allows for personal, non-commercial use? If the same is the case, how do they intend to police this? Can people delivering video to Flash fall foul of licences if they know it is to be played on Flash for commercial purposes?

   And (assuming my above speculation is true) is any “royalty-free” deal they can work out going to be Open Source friendly? People have tried and failed to get these details right before, even with the best will in the world.

5. Ian McKellar Says:
   July 3rd, 2009 at 6:37 am

   All I know from talking to people in the free codecs space is that Vorbis has had extensive patent searches but Theora has not. People are often confused by this because they think that “OGG” has had extensive patent searches.

   I have no idea if there are patents that could be used to file a lawsuit against companies for shipping software using Theora, but I’m not sure I’d gamble my company on that.

   Firefox shipping Theora is definitely a good thing though. Firefox has the profile to attract lawsuits, MoCo has the money to fight them and Mozilla has the mission that justifies this.

6. rsayre Says:
   July 3rd, 2009 at 6:39 am

   Hi Ian,

   Fortunately, Mozilla is not the only one shipping Ogg Theora. Google and Opera have also stated their intent to do so, or are already doing so.

7. Duv Says:
   July 3rd, 2009 at 8:54 am

   @Robert Kaiser: I find it rather funny that they have been willing to dismiss any current findings from SFLC. Unless they are willing to be a third party in the search I can’t see that line of thinking being any good to Apple.

   @dave: I am not sure about Apple, but since they are using the QT media framework for the audio and video tags, I would assume that they abound to the EULA for the said framework.
   Google is odder, since for what it sounds like, they will be using there current framework with ffmpeg for H.264 playback. If that is the case, then I would assume that it’s governed by the LGPL 2.1 and the EULA which may come into conflict. Still… that is a projection based on what I have seen in Chromium, I could be very wrong.

8. carmen Says:
   July 4th, 2009 at 10:00 am

   exactly the kind of attitude that irritates me to the point of not buying apple products for going on a decade now..