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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

HEIF has the problem of being patent-encumbered. Cisco has graciously given out decoding licenses, but encoding is murkier. Luckily, hardware acceleration usually isn't required for still images, so you can encode to whatever, as browsers can decode them all just fine.

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WebP and AV1 are patent-encumbered as well.

Google provides a royalty-free patent license, which can be revoked.

https://github.com/ImageMagick/webp/blob/main/PATENTS

AOMedia has a "royalty-free patent licensing commitment from all AOMedia members", but that doesn't mean that AV1 users won't have to pay to license patents from non-members.

http://aomedia.org/press%20releases/the-alliance-for-open-me...

Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. Even if it's conditioned on a grant of reciprocality. It's only when patent holders start demanding money (or worse, withholding licenses altogether) that it becomes a problem for us.

> Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented.

I agree 100%, and am not the person arguing that patent-encumbered technology is incompatible with free software or bad in any way.

The point of my unpopular post is simply that making a decision based on whether a technology is patent-encumbered makes zero sense in this case since all of them are.

The terms of the patent grant matter. AV1 and WebP are free-to-use. H.265 has a fee per encoder and decoder.

>Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented.

If I remember correctly, Firefox at one point refuse to include h.264 decoder even if they granted royalty free usage because the codec is considered patent encumbered.

That's why the word "blanket" is included there - if you just give Firefox and Firefox alone a royalty-free H.264 license, that's not compatible with Free Software, you can't legally fork it without getting another patent license that will almost certainly cost money.

AFAIK the thing Firefox refused to accept wound up happening anyway. Cisco released a nominally BSD-licensed H.264 decoder and agreed to pay the maximum royalty possible to MPEG-LA. If you use their specific codec binaries, then you're covered under the patent license. So Mozilla wound up writing a new plugin framework specifically to host OpenH264 so that WebRTC could have a standard codec.

>which can be revoked.

or more precisely, irrevocable except if you try to sue google for patent infringement.

Ah, the good ole' React license trick. Where is the mob outrage? Or are web developers so fickle to not care outside of JavaScript frameworks? Video encoding standards are much lower on the stack and the potential for damage is much greater compared to a website.

The difference between the AOM license and React license is that the React license terminates if you sue Facebook for any patent infringement, whereas the AOM license only terminates if you sue an AOM user for an AV1-related patent.

Reciprocal patent grants are not an uncommon or bad licensing practice. The only problem was that Facebook was doing it, which raises suspicion purely because Facebook is Facebook and Facebook is bad.

http://aomedia.org/membership/members/

Are you suggesting that the members (including many tech giants) are overlooking some patents held by others which will then be used to extract a price ruining the format they have all been pushing? This seems somewhat unlikely right?

> Are you suggesting that the members (including many tech giants) are overlooking some patents held by others which will then be used to extract a price ruining the format they have all been pushing?

They're definitely not overlooking it — the AOMedia statement I linked to above was a direct response to the collected patent claims by non-members, which number over 1,000 so far.

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