Re: [rtcweb] VP8 vs H.264 - the core issue

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <[e-mail]>]

* Matthew Kaufman wrote:
>On 10/23/2013 11:51 AM, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>> The dominant video codec, H.264, is a royalty-required codec.
>>
>> Do we switch now, or do we give up and live with royalties forever?
>
>This is a little dramatic. One can trivially prove that every technology 
>required to implement H.264 will lose the protection of the patent 
>system in a finite period of time. Much, much sooner than "forever".

The patent systems that are enforced on this planet can trivially be
modified and term extensions are not exactly unheard of. And it seems
pretty clear to me that if we as a society switched from royality co-
decs to free ones then we would be pretty unlikely to switch back to
royality codecs in the forseeable future; if we stick with them we're
likely to pay royalities for whatever non-free codec becomes popular
next, and that process may well continue indefinitely. In this sense,
you would rather have to show that we would make "the switch" later.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[e-mail] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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