Re: [rtcweb] H.264 patent licensing options

[Roman Shpount <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 2:24 AM, Florian Weimer <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> This is about IETF policy towards RAND licensing.  It's a working
> group and IETF decision, not something that can be left to lawyers.
>

When discussing RAND terms in general, I would suggest reading something
like this
http://www.cravath.com/files/Uploads/Documents/Publications/3233990_1.pdf
and then talking to your legal counsel.

Typically, as far as standards are concerned (this comes with a a huge
IANAL disclaimer), obligation to license IPR under RAND terms implies only
that some licensing terms will be offered for this IPR to anybody who is
willing to implement the standard. What these terms are is up to the IPR
holder. In a lot of cases, obligation to license under RAND terms is
meaningless and the actual licensing policy by IPR holders must be
considered.

In case of H.264, as far as our company is concerned, this implies that we
cannot license H.264 IPR. To work around this, we are planning to offer
H.264 in client software on the platforms where H.264 is provided by the
platform itself or via OpenH264. In both cases, we consider H.264 licensing
will be something that will occur between the end user and the platform
provider, or, in case of OpenH264, between the end user and Cisco. If end
users decides to ignore the H.264 licensing terms, as they typically do,
this is between the end user and whoever provided them with the H.264
license. We will not license H.264 ourselves or provide any H.264 licenses
from us to our customers. In anything that we license directly to our
customers or operate ourselves (which typically means professional
conferencing services), we are planning to support VP8 only and will not
claim WebRTC compliance. End points which implement H.264 only will not be
fully supported by the services we operate and would only be provided with
limited feature set that can be enabled based on peer-to-peer
communications or relay without the need for transcoding or
other H.264 related server functionality. This is why the currently offered
compromise works for us even though H.264 licensing policy is less then
ideal.
_____________
Roman Shpount