> It’s not “extortion” to charge money for people to use technology you developed

They aren't charging for use of their technology, they're charging for use of their algorithms/patents.

The extortion part comes from making it an industry standard, we should never allow proprietary protocols to become (official or de-facto) standards.

MPEG-LA members built the algorithms, at great expense. These aren’t Amazon’s “one click shopping” patents. And what’s the alternative to bankrolling protocol development with patents? It has worked just fine for decades, including for really fundamental things like memory interfaces. What’s the alternative monetization model? The web? Where the pretense of standardization has been dropped and the “standard” is de facto driven by compatibility with a browser that is developed for the sole purpose of spying on people and peddling advertising?

The alternatives to patents are trade secrets, open source style collaboration and academic research. All 3 have been pursued quite successfully to develop compression algorithms. 20 year monopolies are not necessary.

Open source collaboration is usually bankrolled by something else. E.g. the top two corporate contributors to the Linux kernel each contribute more than all the independent contibutors together. Sometimes the something else is benign (Redhat funds Linux development by selling support), sometimes not (Google funds Blink development through advertising).[1] Trade secrets wouldn’t work for a video codec. Which leaves academic research, which is bankrolled by taxes and tuition. Should tax dollars be used to subsidize development of consumer products primarily used for entertainment? I think the 20 year monopoly is relatively innocuous in comparison, or at least the alternatives are not obviously less problematic.

[1] 802.11fb, now with opposition research acquisition at the MAC layer!

> Should tax dollars be used to subsidize development of consumer products primarily used for entertainment?

If this means abolishing patents: then yes.

By the way: video codecs have a lot more applications than entertainment. I just want to mention teleconferencing.

Exactly. VP9 development is funded by YouTube, mostly. Works great.

I mean I think this is just where we disagree. Its better to just buy a device and have a couple of bucks go to h.264 development than rely on something like Youtube which makes money, among other things, peddling advertising to children and teenagers, convincing them to buy crap they don’t need. When I was young I thought Microsoft dominating everything was bad, but at least they had a business model where you paid them money for a product. Buy a Pocket PC and Microsoft gets $15 or whatever. I think this new trend of everything being funded by ads and data mining is destroying computing. I’d love to go back to the “bad old days” of companies having to pay Symbian instead of getting Android “for free” or having to buy Office instead of getting Google Docs “for free,” or buy a Garmin instead of getting Google Maps “for free.” This is not how I saw computing turning out, I don’t think this ends well, and I certainly don’t want more of the that replacing models that worked perfectly well before. What’s next, Facebook bankrolling DDR5?

The problem with h.264 was, that it dictated the business model for everything that embedded it. In this regard, it was exactly the same "cancer" as Microsoft once said about GPL.

Today, purchasing Windows doesn't guarantee you ad- and data mininig free system, and soon it will be difficult to purchase Office at all, you will be renting. In this regard, I'm happy that there are different business models, not just one that would slowly pick the worst traits of everything else.

> The problem with h.264 was, that it dictated the business model for everything that embedded it. In this regard, it was exactly the same "cancer" as Microsoft once said about GPL.

To add on this argument: another huge problem is that the license terms made open source development/distribution really hard (i.e. a patent minefield). Similarly it could lead to legal trouble for people who just hosted their videos.

Exactly, as a consumer I don't mind paying $1 more for VVC technology. And that together is nearly $2B of patents fee yearly assuming no cap. From Mobile Phones, PC, Tablet, and many others.

The biggest problem is those companies within the group don't agree on the percentage spilt between them. Basically they are just being bloody greedy. And the reason why we have MPEG-LA, HEVC Advance, Velos Group and others.

The good things is that most companies realise how much of a poor job MPEG-LA did ( My guess is that they only cares about their commission any way ), they started MC-IF [1], which includes most of the original HEVC MPEG-LA Group members, HEVC Advance Members and one Velos members as well. They are basically most of the Japanese players... and ...... Qualcomm.

I really wish VVC succeed, and push the technical limits of Video Compression as well as replacement of JPEG, without all the dramas and patents problems.

[1] http://www.mc-if.org/our-members

The problem with patents is that it's not good enough to simply ignore other patents and build your own thing - you can still end up infringing, despite never having heard of the company with the patent, let alone the way they implemented something that's obvious.

> MPEG-LA members built the algorithms, at great expense.

At least MP3 was created partially with taxpayer money as a cooperation between the the Fraunhofer Institute and the Friedrich Alexander University at Nuremberg. The Fraunhofer Institute is largely funded by commercial research, but ~30% of its funding come from the German federal state and the individual German states.

MPEG-LA is not associated with the MPEG. It’s a company that holds patents which are crucial for implementing MPEG videos.

> What’s the alternative monetization model?

There's the heart of the issue, the belief that everything can and should have a monetization model. The fact that we had to invent a whole new artificial class of property to handle the existing model should set off some alarm bells here.

A lot of organisations make a lot of money from these algorithms, is having them chip into a non-profit to develop free and open standards too much? How about having some of that research from universities and government standards bodies chip in too?

I don’t think it’s beneficial for society to have standards that are covered by patents.

I agree that inventors should be compensated, but this 20y patented-standard model looks too one-sided to me.

In patents, 20 years seems oppressive. But in copyright, it is something to dream of.

Compression has always been a patent minefield. Even for something as simple as gzip, it was a lot of legal work. For video compression, it is much worse. I am suprise that VLC does even exist despite such a minefield.

Usually, free software get a royalty free license. In the case of HEVC, software decoders are free as long as they are not bundled with hardware. They explicitly said that they are OK with VLC.

Worth noting that the patent conditions still apply. It may be a problem for some free software distribution, and as a result software like VLC isn't always available by default.

> Usually, free software get a royalty free license. In the case of HEVC, software decoders are free as long as they are not bundled with hardware.

The problem is that "bundling with hardware" is very vague. For example, if some OEM sells their PCs/laptops with preinstalled GNU/Linux (containing VLC), does this count as bundling. Or let us consider, say, a singleboard computer that can be both used as a PC and a set-top box just by installing a different firmware (think GNU/Linux distribution) that is provided for free (as beer) at the vendor's website - what is bundling then?

The PC is a bundle and the OEM (not VLC) needs to pay for the license. I think the second case is also a bundle: there are specific clauses to close such loopholes.

Worth noting that the license is less than a dollar per device and the manufacturer is only required to pay if he sells like 100k devices per year.

The PC is obviously a bundle.

In some countries, software patents are not enforceable.

And is codec development improving at a much more rapid pace there compared to the US?

> MPEG-LA is not locking up technology that already existed or other people developed. Its members are the folks who originally developed this technology. It’s notable that no open-source entity developed something like h.264 first.

Note that its claims are not necessarily founded on anything e.g. MPEG-LA created a patent pool for DisplayPort, VESA claims the tech is completely royalty-free.

MPEG-LA is unrelated to MPEG.

Yes? Nothing I said links MPEG-LA to MPEG, and my other comments specifically make the point that they're unrelated.

Software patents protection racket is a morally bankrupt "business model". It only exists because of the broken legal system that allows such parasites to slow down progress.

They're not slowing down progress AT ALL - their patent is remarkably easy to understand, their reference implementation is available, and if you wanted to reimplement it, they will send you a complete spec by email! They are using patents for their intended purpose - they're making money by licensing the method of doing something they figured out how to do better than anybody else.

If you don't know how software patents are slowing down progress, there are a lot of materials that explain it in detail. Some might be proponents of that approach (for the sake of profiteering), but claiming that it's helping progress is hypocrisy.

While software patents may be broken in many instances, I don’t think video codecs are one of them. It’s not like MPEG-LA is suing people for using independently-developed designs that just happen to infringe. If you’re infringing the MPEG patents it’s likely because you’re purposefully building on their work.

And that’s okay in my book. I much preferred the old days when everyone just paid Sony and Panasonic for a license than the current model where “free” codecs are bankrolled by spying on everyone’s email and helping Russians fix elections.

> It’s not like MPEG-LA is suing people for using independently-developed designs that just happen to infringe

I think you missed the whole FUD campaign against VPx, where they tried to persuade the public that VPx does infringe patents in their pool.

The problem comes in when patents have the effect of walling off an entire subfield of computer science from the perspective of the commercial R&D world.

Classic cases in point are IBM's patent on arithmetic encoding, which rendered that entire class of algorithms radioactive in the 1980s-1990s era, and the original Lempel-Ziv patent claims dating back to 1978.

We are most certainly not better off as a society because we granted decade+ monopolies on those claims, and I see no reason to think any differently of MPEG.

MPEG-LA are actively trying to impede development of open codecs, or slow them down with FUD and threats. They are acting like a classic racketeer thug. I'm surprised some are trying to whitewash their behavior. I guess glorified mafia is the way to "move things into the future" according to MPEG-LA supporters.