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

[Ron <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 10:33:04AM -0800, David Singer wrote:
> 
> Consider finally: a small company for whom WebRTC is important.
> 
> Let’s look at the choices:
> 
> 1.  Follow the mandate, implement VP8, and risk a ruinous lawsuit from Nokia.
> 
> 2.  Reject the mandate, do not implement VP8, and be formally therefore not conformant and therefore not in receipt of a license from company X; risk a ruinous lawsuit from X.
> 
> 3.  Do not implement WebRTC, and risk a ruinous loss of relevance.

This seems more like a hypothetical small strawman than a situation
that any *real* small company has expressed to this group.

Your concern for small operators is heartwarming, but I think if you
consult the list archives to see what such people have actually said
for themselves, the only ruinous legal barrier that Nokia appears to
have them worried about is the IPR it holds on H.264 that is outside
the pool MPEG-LA operates, with no clear guarantee of its terms.

And we *still* don't have an IPR statement from them about this.
How many times should we need to ask them to respect the IETF process?


Fear of VP8 here would appear to be directly proportional to something
much simpler than what you claim.

If someone would like to graph "Number of H.264 patents held" vs
"Fear of VP8 being MTI", I think you'll find the real correlation
that you're grasping for here to be fairly obvious.

  hth!
  Ron