[rtcweb] H.264 IPR status (Re: VP8 litigation in Germany?)

Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no> Tue, 12 March 2013 03:20 UTC

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Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 04:20:33 +0100
From: Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>
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Subject: [rtcweb] H.264 IPR status (Re: VP8 litigation in Germany?)
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On 03/12/2013 02:27 AM, Markus.Isomaki@nokia.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Ted Hardie wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 6:23 PM, DRAGE, Keith (Keith) <keith.drage@alcatel-
>> lucent.com> wrote:
>>> As I believe there are no IETF documents that specify H.264 or VP8 directly,
>> then you will not get a direct declaration.
>> This contradicts what I understood Markus to be saying, which is that Nokia
>> would supply one.  If I have misunderstood this text:
>>
>> Nokia is preparing to do a disclosure about it to the  IETF "to ensure that IETF
>> working groups and participants have as much information about any IPR
>> constraints on a technical proposal as  possible".
>>
>> I hope he will let me know.
>>
> Yes, Nokia is preparing a disclosure related to VP8.
>
> What comes to H.264, the Nokia IPR related to that has been disclosed to those SDOs where that codec has been developed, except for the RTP payload format that is in the IETF. I assume all that is publicly available to interested parties. If I recall correctly, some pointers were floating around prior to IETF 85. I'm sure others on this list know that side better than me.
>

I know of 3 sources of IPR information related to H.264:

- The ISO database of disclosures ( 
http://www.iso.org/iso/standards_development/patents)
- The MPEG-LA list of IPR available for licensing via their license pool
- The list that Cliff Reader did related to H.264 Baseline work in MPEG

The first 2 are public on the Web; I don't know the status of the third 
one (MPEG doesn't make its input documents public by default).

I think it's fair to ask the proponents of H.264 to present the IPR 
situation for their candidate codec; saying that it is "well known" is 
not the same as having an input contribution to the IETF stating what 
the situation is.