Google licenses VP8 patents from MPEG-LA

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130307006192/en/Google-MPEG-LA-Announce-Agreement-Covering-VP8

by av500 • 13 years ago

109 86 13 years ago

wmf4• 13 years ago

This shows that VP8 wasn't as patent-free as On2/Google claimed. OTOH, there's probably nothing to worry about now since Google has licensed the patents on behalf of everyone.

Original context from 2010: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

duskwuff2• 13 years ago

> OTOH, there's probably nothing to worry about now since Google has licensed the patents on behalf of everyone.

Or have they? The press release says that Google can sublicense the patents to other VP8 implementors...

edit: never mind, the rtcweb post (below) nails it down a bit.

wmf4• 13 years ago

They just sent this out: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg06631... "Google intends to license the techniques under terms that are in line with the W3C’s definition of a Royalty Free License."

(I also see they're playing a bit of the martyr by saying "This agreement is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8." As if the truth has anything to do with patents.)

armored_mammal• 13 years ago

...on the other hand nothing is patent free these days. If the diaphragm were invented today we'd all be getting our lungs ripped out for patent infringement.

mdda• 13 years ago

It doesn't demonstrate that VP8 wasn't patent-free - just that Google felt signing a license with MPEG-LA was the best route to clearing up the issue.

IMHO, MPEG-LA probably just scored some free cash. However, by avoiding a legal battle, and getting a 'clean bill of health' for VP8 from their main detractor, Google's VP8 is now ready for much wider adoption. After all, the principle patent-free niggle issue has now been dealt with cleanly.

taligent8• 13 years ago

Patents were never the reason for a lack of VP8 adoption. When you have the likes of Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft and Sony firmly against it was always going to be a dead on arrival.

I honestly don't know why Google bothered to buy the company in the first place. Seems an odd place to assert a competing position.

danbmil997• 13 years ago

Precisely the opposite. If MPEG-LA thought they had VP8 dead to rights, they would never have agreed to this deal -- they would have litigated to the bitter end.

This is actually a huge badge of honor for VP8, and a repudiation of the meme that somehow it's just an H.264 knock-off. It's always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264 (aka MPEG4++). MPEG-LA are IMSHO the very definition of trolls -- patenting (and charging royalties for) techniques that were obvious and known art in the video compression community for ages.

wmf4• 13 years ago

Litigating to the bitter end is rarely rational. I can imagine a couple scenarios where this deal makes sense; e.g. if Google paid more than what a pool would have earned.

anon13852• 13 years ago

>It's always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264

The same community that hates patent trolls continued to use gif and MP3 for many years, so I'm not sure why use of H264 would surprise you. And are people really 'in love' with it? All I see is people who prefer the clearly technically superior option. Not to mention the fact that many of us live in places where software patents are not relevant, and don't feel inclined to use inferior technology just because of the idiocies of the US legal system.

taligent8• 13 years ago

Well this is an interesting way to look at it.

Litigation is rarely a smart move for a licensing organisation. During the years wasted going back/forth during appeals etc the competitor has a price margin advantage which they can use to increase market share. It's not that easy to quantity that if damages are awarded.

And seriously you either need to put up or STFU. If you have some prior art that invalidates specific patents then speak up. Plenty of companies would be very, very interested. But I'm going to take a guess that you don't.

zdw• 13 years ago

Ignoring the patent issues for a second...

The reason why people tend to be fans of H.264 is that it has a wide range of hardware that can encode/decode and that hardware has been available for years. This saves greatly on power for embedded devices/phones/etc.

While implementations of VP8 in hardware do exist, I'm not aware of it shipping in any sort of volume. Are there any modern Android phones that can do VP8 in hardware?

nl2• 13 years ago

There is no such thing as "dead to rights" in a patent war over algorithms. It would come down to the jury, and it would be a gamble (as the disagreement amongst people who should know about whether VP8 infringes or not shows).

The risk for MPEG-LA in not agreeing is that the patent pool would collapse - if Google isn't in then why should anyone else remain in the pool?

I do agree that this agreement seems to be pretty good for Google though. Their ability to sub license VP8 has the potential to undermine royalties for H264 to the patent pool.

BTW, MPEG-LA isn't a patent troll by any conventional definition.

Firstly, MPEG-LA doesn't patent anything itself, they are merely an organisation to pool related patents amongst member organisations.

Secondly, the member organisations are mostly (all?) the opposite of patent trolls, too: they hold patents in the field because they are actively producing software in the field. That is the opposite of the typical non-practising-entity patent troll model.

Thirdly, if you do accept software patents then the patent pool model is actually quite a nice way to manage them. It means people who want to work in the field only have to deal with one entity and gain protection from patent claims from any other company in the field. (Note: I don't accept software patents at all - just pointing out that while they exist this isn't a bad way to do them).

I have no real opinion on VP8 vs H264, but I do know that the patent situation is much more complex than you seem to believe.

tzs• 13 years ago

> Precisely the opposite. If MPEG-LA thought they had VP8 dead to rights, they would never have agreed to this deal -- they would have litigated to the bitter end.

Huh? Whether or not they had VP8 dead to rights, they would agree to a licensing deal. The MPEG-LA's purpose is to make licensing deals for the patents in their pools. They litigate when they cannot get an agreement for a licensing deal.

chongli• 13 years ago

>It's always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264

There is no hypocrisy here; I am allowed to love technology while simultaneously hating the practices if its authors. I am allowed to benefit from the good produce of a bad regime. In no way does that compromise my argument for reform.

Those who try to argue that reformers ought to boycott everything they disagree with are making a kind of appeal to hypocrisy; a logical fallacy.

shmerl7• 13 years ago

This doesn't really show anything until the details on these patents are published.

ZeroGravitas4• 13 years ago

The fun think about patent poker is that the players never reveal their hand, regardless of if they win or lose.

Microsoft ended up giving Barnes & Noble (a bookstore for goodness sake) half-a-billion dollars after going after them for Android/Linux patents, but if you read the press release then they focus on an ongoing royalty payment going in the opposite direction.

Google may have entered negotiation with these 11 patent holding firms and threatened to destroy them with either a giant patent lawsuit or just by bullying them with their massive bank account, team of corporate lawyers, and market control. I would suggest the royalty free licence to these patents for use in VP8 or VP9 would take either that or a very big bag of cash from Google (or some combination of the two).

It's not really to either sides benefit to reveal what happened after they've got the best deal they thought they could though.

0x092• 13 years ago

There's also a post on the webm project blog about it: http://blog.webmproject.org/2013/03/vp8-and-mpeg-la.html

> we may sublicense those techniques to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis

What did Google put in their drinks?

olgeni• 13 years ago

And what did the complimentary Google Glasses actually show?

samspenc• 13 years ago

I wonder if this also relates to the Motorola-Microsoft lawsuit over Motorola patents being used in Microsoft products... apparently MPEG-LA figures in there somehow: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130302164903635

rayiner• 13 years ago

This is an educational take on VP8 that considers both patent issues and technical issues: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

This seems like a pretty rational way to go. It side steps the issue fairly cleanly by paying off the consortium who now would look bad if they came back and tried to sue people for using VP8.

taligent8• 13 years ago

Pretty sure the handful of people who use VP8 aren't going to cause a PR problem for MPEG LA or its members.

nitrogen5• 13 years ago

It's obvious you have a personal axe to grind with VP8. You show up in every VP8 thread, going on and on about how VP8 is dead on arrival[0].

Why don't you tell us all why you're so personally invested in this argument?

[0] http://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=VP8+taligent

Millennium• 13 years ago

Way to legitimize the FUD, Google.

wmf4• 13 years ago

They've already spent over $100M on VP8; I guess they figured it wasn't worth spending more to fight 11 companies to the death.

shmerl7• 13 years ago

It could be beneficial if they'd bust their patents in the process.

RRRA• 13 years ago

Indeed! Why not support software patent while they're at it... oh, and on maths, arts and recipes too!

danbmil997• 13 years ago

This is an excellent development -- it takes almost all the remaining FUD out of VP8.

shmerl7• 13 years ago

This sounds bad. Does it mean that Google admits that VP8 is patent encumbered now? What are those patents and is it really true or it's Google chickening before the MPEG-LA trolls and there are no real patents involved?

stefantalpalaru• 13 years ago

Looks like they just payed the bullies instead of fighting them.

shmerl7• 13 years ago

Google should disclose what those patents are so others could evaluate whether they really affect the codec or not. While I don't like that Google obliges these trolls, this can be conductive for wider VP8 adoption.

gcp4• 13 years ago

Does it mean that Google admits that VP8 is patent encumbered now?

No, both the wording and explicit statements made make it clear that VP8 doesn't infringe anything: "if any"..."may be essential".

As if they can't tell whether the patents apply after all those years of throwing FUD at it.

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

Now if only Google would actually remove H.264 support from Chrome.

calebegg2• 13 years ago

For real. They said they were going to over two years ago.

http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in...

I'd really like to see them actually follow through on this.

Already__Taken• 13 years ago

A huge part of the problems with the web are people playing politics with technology.

Leave the highly common hardware accelerated that's the _only_ one all browsers support alone.

VP8 can beat it on technical grounds.

calebegg2• 13 years ago

As far as I remember, Firefox only supports H.264 on Windows. So it's not quite supported by all browsers.

jfb4• 13 years ago

Of course, without b-frames, VP8 can't beat squat.

holloway• 13 years ago

What does this mean for the WebRTC developers who made Opus and are now looking at making a video codec?

It would have been nice to have examples of video that didn't step on MPEGLA's patents.

gcp4• 13 years ago

There is a push to make VP8 MTI for WebRTC, but there was obvious pushback from people who preferred H.264, despite most of the normal arguments for H.264 (hardware support) have zero bearing on the low-latency requirements of WebRTC (most hardware encoders can't meet the requirements for videochat).

Those people didn't have an argument and can't even pretend they have one now.

What's going to happen next is that all in the MPEG-LA will still oppose making VP8 MTI (because the licensing for it is obviously way less interesting for them compared to H.264), but any neutral bystanders might be swayed more in the direction of VP8.

It would have been nice to have examples of video that didn't step on MPEGLA's patents.

We have, it's called VP8.

josteink• 13 years ago

Invent your own technology and then license the patents for it from someone else.

Hmmm... Why doesn't that seem right?

Google licenses VP8 patents from MPEG-LA

Related Stories