Re: [rtcweb] Finishing up the Video Codec document, MTI (again, still, sorry)

Both yours and David's responses to this are outside the IPR gathering exercise that forms part of the standards process.

The idea of the standards process is that a group of vendors etc write a standard, they are forced to declare their IPR involved in that standard. If the population is sufficiently large you stand a good chance of identifying all the worldwide IPR relating to that standard.

The bigger the standards organisation, with the greater coverage of all the vendors in that space, the better the process works.

So at that level, IPR knowledge for codecs is primarily on the decoder space and what IPR exists there.

What Tim is saying (and a somewhat parallel situation exists with MPEG LA) is that a limited set of organisations will limit your IPR problems and give you some help with the encoder IPR. For VP8 that is limited to Google's IPR and any background research they may have done. For MPEG LA it is limited to the members of the pool, which is only a subset of those involved in the parallel standards process. Yes it helps, but it does not have the degree of confidence of identifying all the existing IPR that the standards process would do.

Regards

Keith

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rtcweb [mailto:rtcweb-bounces@ietf.org] On Behalf Of 
> Timothy B. Terriberry
> Sent: 04 December 2014 21:16
> To: rtcweb@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: [rtcweb] Finishing up the Video Codec document, 
> MTI (again, still, sorry)
> 
> Roman Shpount wrote:
> > Actually Google does grant patent license to the implementation of 
> > WebM, which includes both encoder and decoder 
> > (http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/). This is 
> one of the 
> > reasons we think VP8 license is better then H.264. (The 
> other two are 
> > reciprocity and no use restrictions on the produced media).
> 
> Serge also confirmed on this list that that license applies 
> to third-party implementations as well: 
> https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg04006.html
> 
> The Opus licenses similarly grant rights to patents that read 
> on the reference implementation, including the encoder, even 
> if used in a third-party implementation.
> 
> Now, it's certainly possible to infringe other people's IPR 
> by implementing an encoder sufficiently different from the 
> reference encoder. One must be very careful when doing that. 
> But these reference implementations are production-grade. 
> Anyone who merely wishes to deploy a codec has an 
> implementation they can use with just as much assurance of 
> the IPR safety of the encoder as they have of the decoder.
> 
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