Whether such work is supposedly IPR free or not does not guarantee against future IPR claims. I'm not even convinced that claims by an author that something is IPR free gives any better guarantee of such. The only hope you have is that a particular solution has been worked on in an organisation which requires declaration of IPR from participants, and that all the player in the field with enough money to initiate an IPR claim were involved in that work. So if I wanted the safest solution against future IPR claims, I'd go for the one that was worked on by the largest number of significant companies in an SDO with an appropriate IPR policy. Note that this is safest, not safe. Keith
-----Original Message----- From: dispatch-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:dispatch-bounces@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Adam Roach Sent: Friday, January 07, 2011 7:33 PM To: David Singer Cc: Bernard Aboba; Harald Alvestrand; rtc-web@alvestrand.no; dispatch@ietf.org Subject: [dispatch] Known encumberances != exhaustive list of encumberances (was Gateways and does anyone think "H.264 for ever"?)
On 1/7/11 12:23 PM, David Singer wrote:
Your list is a start, but it also needs to consider the availability of acceleration and hardware support (maybe that's part of your first bullet), and (alas) IPR risk.
You've brought up IPR risk a couple of times now, with the implication that a codec with known IPR entanglements is somehow safer than a codec without. This is a fallacy that we need to dispense with.
The argument with purportedly "IPR Free" technologies is that as-yet unidentified patents may apply, and be asserted at a later date. This is true.
However, the identification of one or more patents that *do* apply to a technology does nothing to mitigate the risk that additional as-yet unidentified patents may also apply to it. If you have a set of unknown size, finding some elements in the set does nothing to prove that all the elements have been found. All you know is that the set is not empty (which, in this case, is a drawback).
This shouldn't be news to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the situation. As I'm certain you are aware, the MPEG-LA licensing pool agreement for H.264 explicitly calls out these potentially unknown patents as a risk, and warns licensees that dealing with any resultant problems is the licensees' problem, not MPEG-LAs.
In other words: it is every bit as likely that an entity will assert a previously unidentified, valid patent against H.264 as it is that a company will assert such a patent against Theora or VP8. Implications to the contrary are propaganda.
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