It depends on how you use them and what you use them for. But in general, yes.

So perhaps Google should start saying openly it's about the money, not about "openness" (which seems to be defined every week as something different by one company or another).

Once money/licensing is involved, it does become an issue of openness. Think of it as the letter of the spec versus the spirit of the spec.

If h.264 becomes the de facto standard for HTML5 video encoding, then a browser such as Firefox, or any free/open browser, will be financially unable to implement a completely standards compliant browser due to the cost of licensing.

Yes, one could supply other codecs to support the video tag since no codec is specified in the spec but if the majority of content out there is focused on h.264 then the effect is the same as not supporting the video tag at all.

> you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA license fees under most circumstances

As far as I am aware software patents only hold in the USA and a few other countries that the US has strong armed into accepting them. So I don't think you need to worry about the MPEGLA coming after you if you are somewhere on the other 90% of the planet.

I am far from a lawyer, but there are several international patent treaties, signed by a wide range of countries. See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internationa...

Also there's the World Intellectual Property Organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Org...) of which the majority of counties are members.

Yes, specifically software patents may be considered a bit of an unconfirmed area, but I doubt it's something many people would want to risk going up against.

The last person they list as being sued on their news page is Lidl, a european supermarket chain.

http://www.mpegla.com/main/Pages/Media.aspx

The licenses fees don't kick in until you ship something like 10,000 units, then it is something like $0.25 per unit for decoders. (numbers from memory, consult mpeg-la for accuracy).

So anyone is free to tinker with x264 as much as they like. The people who have trouble are the free OS distribution folks, e.g. Debian, who ship enough to trip the license… and google chrome.

Maybe they just got tired of paying a quarter for each download.

While you are right pointing out the notion of triggering a limit breach and thus having to pay out the dues, that is exactly what needs to be avoided. This is not a home-brew, I made a tinker-toy use case that Mozilla and Google are describing. They are defending a ubiquitous tool such as a browser, that is prevailing as the de facto standard of accessing information. That channel needs to be kept free.

Imagine a scenario where an ink/printer producer patents blending of the colors and every newspaper in the world has to pay $0.25 for every paper they print after 10,000 units.

What I hope that people understand, and I'm aiming high by including the well connected writers and media personnel, that tools that serve as backbones for information flow need to stay free. There are software engineers working on that tirelessly. To undo their effort or trip them up, is to hurt the very rights to freedom to information.

Imagine a scenario where an ink/printer producer patents blending of the colors and every newspaper in the world has to pay $0.25 for every paper they print after 10,000 units.

It's far worse than that! My city's newspaper is printed with patented ink[1]. They pay for every drop they use, even for papers they don't sell, even for ink they wash down the drain.

And your numbers are way off. Imagine if I had to pay a one time $0.25 fee to read my $22/month newspaper would be more like it.

I look forward to a time when I can code and not worry about patents[2], but hobbling people to make a strategic move is not the path to that end.

  Cost                         Thing
  ################             Computer hardware: $400/year
  #######                      Computer software: $200/year
  ##                           Power for computer: $50/year
  ############################ Internet connection: $720/year
  .                            H.264 license: $0.25 

  (Note: The graph is probably off. I have 26 pixels in a #
         so the '.' would need to be a single pixel, but is four.
         So, mentally expand the '#' lines by 4 to get the
         perspective right. Oh, and that is not annual, so 
         maybe another three times.

         And while we're at it, notice that video is probably your
         biggest bandwidth need and that by using a more efficient 
         encoding you can use the next tier down at your ISP or 
         pay for fewer bits and save 100 times the cost of the 
         H.264 license.)

[1] Probably. They announced switching to the new eco friendly ink with great fanfare. I suspect if they went back to a traditional ink I would not hear.

[2] I've personally cancelled a lucrative product after development was completed over patent fears (needlessly it turns out, the patent owner in question never elected to go hunting and we probably didn't infringe but were unwilling to endure the legal distraction), and just this week was discussing picking the bones of a local company that briefly stepped on a ridiculous software patent and had their plug pulled by the parent company instead of fighting the lawsuit.