First of all, as many others have pointed out by specifying the accepted file formats in the <input> tag, they would avoid HEIC entirely as the phone would simply convert to one of the accepted formats.

It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. Even if that were the case, I'm certain there is some commercial license software they could purchase to do that for them. This isn't an open-source endeavor, and they charge each student to take the exam.

1. I think both parties are at fault

The testing system for not using the <input> tag appropiately and Apple for using a closed, patent encumbered format as the default when most of their users don't know about software patents.

> It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend.

It's reasonable to assume that it is.

2. Sure, the college could pay, but looking at the broader problem here, saying that colleges should accept closed formats would make it really hard for open source online testing systems to proliferate, and all colleges around the world would have to pay royalties to the HEIC patent holders.

Even if they were to implement an open source decoder, unless you have plenty of lawyers, the legal uncertainty of the situation could be unacceptable to many individuals/institutions.

3. If the format was open in the first place, maybe we would have lots of open source decoders and maybe the library that the testing system developer used would have support for it, and would have transparently worked without the developer knowing about the format.

1. I'm not going to argue about Apple's defaults here. It simply isn't germane when the college board has full control over the inputs and iPhones will make up a significant portion of test takers.

2. I think you don't understand what the College Board is. It's a single organization that administers test. This isn't something each university needs to deal with. They make and administer the test to all college-bound students in the US each year.

3. There are plenty of existing open source decoders, and all major open source graphics programs already accept the format (GraphicConverter, ImageMagick, GIMP), in addition to all the major OSes (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android).

2. In the specific case of the College Board, yes. Keep in mind that maybe the license fee is based on number of institutions and every student would end up indirectly paying for the license.

But also think about independent educational institutions (primary, secondary, higher, etc), think about all schools and colleges in other countries (we're all in a similar situation). All of them would have to find a way to license HEIC, just because Apple decided that they wanted HEIC as their default format.

3. I'd guess that companies that implement HEIC pay for their license.

The legal situation of using open source programs to decode licensed and patent encumbered formats is uncertain to me, and I guess it is to most people, including software engineers and managers.

No other entity other than The College Board receives the raw test. Everyone else only receives the results. The College Board also charges around $100 for each of these tests, so even if they had to support the format (they don’t) they really should easily be able to do so.

Note that many students take many of these tests, even dozens, so $100/test is quite a lot for what is usually a few hours sit down in a big room with a handful of proctors for hundreds of students (i.e., no more expensive to run than a typical university intro-level class final with a professor and some student TAs).

The whole issue is easily circumvented by correctly setting the accepted inputs, which is clearly the responsibility of the webpage owners. Next time, someone uploads JPEG2000 and runs into the same problem. I guess then it’s again someone else who gets the blame?

The license fee is based on the number of devices performing the conversion; each institution gets a number free; it's less than a few dollars per device.

If the iPhone took pictures in webp format, exactly the same thing would have occurred. College board doesn’t accept that either despite it being open.

webp is also possibly patent-encumbered. At least if you ask various members of the MPEG-LA.

The only safe format for photo-like content remains JPEG probably for decades to come

Yes, I was wondering why a recently completed photo upload feature for a web app didn't have this problem -- it's because we specified image/jpeg on the file input, so iPhone auto-converts. Likely a failure within the college board's software engineering processes for not testing this use case and then finding and deploying this fix? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...

Some of the issues seems to be because some of these students transferred the HEIC file to their computers then tried to upload them by changing the extension of the file.

Wait. There's a way to get safari to upload HEIF without conversion? All my photos, which are HEIF on my phone, turn into jpeg when I upload them. I've been trying to get the original HEIF off for months.

Dropbox and OneDrive allow you to sync HEIF instead of JPEG.

Only native apps that explicitly opt-in to HEIC support.

Do I really need to explain that if I upload a file to Dropbox or iCloud it's still not on the web site form where I want it?

Google Photos syncs HEIF/HEIC to their cloud.

If you don't use your phone to upload, but transfer the file to your computer, it won't do the conversion.

Here's a LGPL decoder: https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

Patents are separate from copyright, so even an independently developed freely licensed open-source software is illegal to use without a patent license from patent owners.

https://www.hevcadvance.com/pdfnew/LicensorList.pdf

Assuming GP is right about the patents, the College Board would open themselves up to patent suits by using that without a license.

Maybe they should just pay the $5 fee...

So what formats do they accept when they want a video? Theora?

>Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3]

College board could have added "iPhone HEIC license surcharge" for those users - that would have gotten Apple attention :)