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Comment by tomlin | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

Granted. I know very little about patents, I still see these loaded statements as conscience injections, red herrings, and convenient sound bites for zealots like Gruber. Might is different that is, but on Gruber's blog it's a testament to an agenda. The MPEG LA knows this.

There is no doubt in my mind that someone has a registered patent that the VP8 codec infringes on, due to the terrible state of the patent system as a whole. Now whether that is a valid patent is something that lawyers and lots of money will determine. However, someone needs to front that money, and AFAIK Google isn't providing patent indemnity for using the codec. It really is a smart business move to pay the relatively small license fee to MPEG LA than risk losing your entire company to a lawsuit (or lawyer fees)

If you really believe the patent system is that bad, then it's just as likely that a rogue patent reads on H.264. Although popularly believed, the MPEG-LA doesn't provide patent indemnity for H.264 so you can pay the small licence fee and still lose your entire company in a lawsuit.

Well the odds are somewhat high that if one has a patent on something in h.264, they would have joined the consortium and gotten royalties for it already. Plus there are a lot of patents that already exist in the patent pool that MPEG-LA has, which is indirectly what the MPEG-LA guy is saying, that one of them probably infringes.

My head hurt after going through one software patent trying to figure out what it actually meant. I can't imagine cross referencing every single patent against everything that WebM does.

So might your own proprietary software. And the Pope might be an axe murderer. A very large number of things might be true. Singling out this software as particularly hazardous because of mights smacks of FUD.

If you walk across a minefield, you might step on a mine. Singling out minefields as particularly hazardous because of mights smacks of FUD.

Joking aside, this is a false dilemma. Patent trolls actually exist, inadvertent patent infringement is not some purely hypothetical risk. Particularly in fields like video codecs where the mines are laid especially thick.

If you walk across a minefield, you are walking into a place where there are proven to be mines in your likely path. That's a much more present danger than the mere possibility of a mine's existence. A minefield verifiably has mines, not just might have mines, and thus walking in an arbitrary path there has a measurable chance of blowing you up (and there might be some specific paths with a 0% chance of blowing you up, which are also different from the minefield in general).

In spite of this supposed huge vulnerability, nobody has ever suggested even one single patent that could potentially be read as covering anything in Google's WebM tech, much less the "minefield" that MPEG-LA try to conjure up with their vague insinuations. You'd be about as well-supported by the evidence if you claimed that God just hates WebM and will smite down anyone who uses it to encode video.

I'm not saying that WebM isn't on a patent minefield. I can't prove that negative claim. But I can say that I've never seen anyone offer any credible evidence for this minefield.

Is there a reason that Google isn't offering patent indemnification other than that they aren't sure WebM is patent free either?

Is there a reason that MPEG-LA isn't offering patent indemnification other than they aren't sure H.264 is patent free either?

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2100601

This argument is total FUD.

Google claims WebM is patent free.

MPEG-LA doesn't claim H.264 is patent free - they just offer a simplified way to license a large number of patents.

If it is FUD, perhaps you can offer an explanation rather than just deflection.

Whats the point of paying for MPEG-LA's license for AVC if doing so doesn't actually make the format legal to use?

Both sides are saying (if not expressly then implied) that their licensing technique is believed to be enough, but they can't promise absolute protection.

The point of paying for the license is that you get the right to use all of the patents in the collection in one step rather than having to negotiate more than a thousand separate licenses. Even if you have to deal with other patents later this is still valuable.

Both sides are simply not saying the same thing. You are putting words into their mouth to make it look as though the MPEG-LA is saying the same as Google.

I think an unencumbered format would be a good thing, and I'm asking a genuine question. Why is Google making a claim they aren't prepared to back up? Why should other people take the risk for them?

Perhaps there's a good reason for this strategy. I can't see it, so I'm asking if anyone else can?

Saying "the other side is just as bad" is uninformative and just turns the discussion into a question of who's side you're on.

WebM - free license, no guarantees of indemnification

H.264 - paid license, no guarantees of indemnification

Any argument that circumvents the above fact is agenda-driven. People know that WebM is the better choice; but are instead trying to find a roundabout way of keeping their H.264 encoders relevant.

Simply untrue. Presented in those terms, the 'fact' is:

WebM - free license, indemnification against 0 patents.

H.264 - paid license, indemnification against > 1700 patents.

(here's the list: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p...)

For WebM to be a free equivalent, Google would have to indemnify users against that list of patents. If Google is sure that the patents are not infringed, why doesn't it at least do that?

Remember that just the idea of a plugin, ActiveX object or layer that communicates with one tech to another is a patent infringement - and yet we are now coming to a point where the open web is embraced over the patent-encumbered.

Apple's camp will talk shit about Flash and how Flash should die because it's patent encumbered, but because iOS has a hardware H.264 encoder suddenly the rules don't apply and it's just fine to be presenting junk science as reasoning so long as its convenient.

You're spending more time trying to convince people to give up the idea of a truly open format instead of just conceding that it's an absolute necessity. Patent trolls might... is not a good reason to give up a necessary measure of innovation.

I'd still be on WebM's side regardless, but I feel like if the tables were turned and WebM was Apple's idea, this conversation would be going a little differently.

You're projecting. The objection to Flash has never really been that it's patent-encumbered. They care that it's a closed specification without any good open-source implementations, which means Adobe totally controls the experience, and Adobe has traditionally crafted a pretty terrible experience. That's the objection. It's not about patents — it's about the difficulty of creating a good user experience around it.

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