New America Foundation: Video Prison: Why Patents Might Threaten Free Online Video
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Started by: ggiedkeggiedke
Date: 05 Jul 2010 06:57
Number of posts: 1
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Summary:
If online videos were subject to patent licensing fees, users could be charged per-view to capture those fees. [...] video licensing could reduce the democratic nature of free and open Internet content to monetizable media. The funny cat videos would be gone forever [...], but so too would the movement-inspiring Nedas of the future remain unknown. [...] As the Web incorporates multimedia, some participants want to control -- and charge for -- its video standards. [...] Some participants in the online video discussion claim that common video codecs [...] cannot be implemented without infringing their patents. One codec under popular consideration for use in HTML5 is H.264 (a.k.a. MPEG-4 AVC), already used for an estimated 66% of all online video content, [...]. Yet H.264 is also claimed to be subject to a pool of patents controlled by MPEG-LA, a limited liability corporation that describes itself as the "world’s leading packager of patent pools for standards"
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