Nominally, yes. These are checked before your movie is being distributed, and you'll most probably face legal consequences if you don't pay for your licenses.

Not getting caught for some time doesn't count either. You'll pay retroactively, with some interest, probably.

Licensing page is at [0]. Considering the previous shenanigans they pulled against open video and audio formats in the past [1], these guys are not sleeping around. These guys call people for patent pools in a format, and license these pools as format licenses.

[0]: https://www.via-la.com/licensing-2/avc-h-264/avc-h-264-licen...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#Criticism

Presumably there's no way of fingerprinting the footage itself as 'unlicenced' so the closest they get is asking the studio what camera serials they used to film.

What about if you're a YouTuber, surely they don't pay?

If you bought a legit licensed product the doctrine of first sale means their patent rights are exhausted.[0] They can't come after you for patent infringement. Those licenses are for manufacturers making new licensed products, not users of licensed products they purchased.

Can you show a single court case or even a press release where someone using a legit licensed product bought on the open market was sued for codec patent infringement?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....

The license doesn't come attached to the device itself, but you as a entity (e.g. movie studio, broadcaster, or solo professional). Transferring the device doesn't transfer the license.

You license the right to use the patent pool for commercial purposes, not the device itself.

My read of parent's link says differently.

Back in the day Kodak had to buy back all their instant cameras after losing to Polaroid. Though I'm not sure if law has changed since then (it has, but I'm not sure if in relevant ways), or just that they did that because no being able to make film made them useless and so buyback was a goodwill gesture.

Could that not have been because they could not sell film for them anymore, rendering them useless? So it was to make customers whole?

Edit: Missed the last part where you said the same

I believe this is why a number of products require you to manually activate a free personal license (by clicking a button and agreeing to TOS) in the settings instead of shipping with it. You are then separately licensing the tech from the software vendor and are personally liable for infringements.

First sale doctrine doesn't exist in my country for anything involving software, as business and business-adjacent software requires compulsory copyright registration and compulsory per-copy government-registered identifier here.