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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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