Competition in the AVC/H.264 licensing market is here! Vialicensing vs. MPEG-LA

[bond]

one of the main arguments when talking about patented technology is that most of the time you have to pay licenses to use these technologies, which are, of course, dictated by the ones who hold the patents

till now (eg MPEG-4 ASP, AAC aso...) this was definitely the case (only one license exisiting for these technolgies), but there seems to be a change when it comes to AVC/H.264:
Now two different companies offer two different licenses for the usage of H.264:
Vialicensing (http://www.vialicensing.com/developments/avc/license.terms.html) and MPEG LA (http://www.mpegla.com/news/n_03-11-17_avc.html)

whats the advantage of having two organisations offering two licenses instead of only one? -> competition
competition lowers the prices as of course every company wants to sell its license. also it allows parties interested in h.264 to bargain more ("if you dont give me this, i go to your competitor aso") which overall should also lower the prices

lets wait and see how this evolves :)

[avih]

hmmm, i don't get it actually... usually the one[s] who can license something is the one owning the IP (or proxing it). how can 2 groups offer a license for the same IP then?

[bond]

Originally posted by avih
hmmm, i don't get it actually... usually the one[s] who can license something is the one owning the IP (or proxing it). how can 2 groups offer a license for the same IP then? well i also wondered about this, but than i realised (this may sound dumb) that in fact they are doing it
when assuming that both are respected licensing organisations i dont assume one of those does something illegal, so this again would mean that they both are authorized to do so by the patent holders

now the question is: why do the patent holders allow this? maybe they have an interest to lower the prices of h.264 so that it gets easily adopted widely (to fight back wmv9, ie on hd-dvd)

[virus]

Originally posted by bond
now the question is: why do the patent holders allow this? maybe they have an interest to lower the prices of h.264 so that it gets easily adopted widely (to fight back wmv9, ie on hd-dvd)
Seems a bit optimistic to me... if MPEG-LA want lower the price, they can do that directly. Maybe it's just a way to earn money: the MPEG-LA will wait a bit then sue the other company claiming they're the Only and Official H.264 Licenser and they're protecting people's rights (!) and <insert some stupid legalese blurb here>... :D

Maybe I'm wrong, but these days patents and lawsuits are the only source of earnings for so many companies... ;)

[bond]

Originally posted by virus
Seems a bit optimistic to me... if MPEG-LA want lower the price, they can do that directly. Maybe it's just a way to earn money: the MPEG-LA will wait a bit then sue the other company claiming they're the Only and Official H.264 Licenser and they're protecting people's rights (!) and <insert some stupid legalese blurb here>... hm that makes no sense for me
1) mpeg-la didnt make vialicensing to offer a h.264 licenses to than be able to sue them. thats some wierd logic for me ;)
2) vialicensing and mpeg-la are companies who worked together with the mpeg patent holders for a long time already. i doubt that they need to do illegal stuff or aim at sueing each other or so to be able to earn money
3) i am sure that both have the right (from the patent holders) to do what they do

[Stux]

Its actually worse than that

MPEG-LA and ViaLicensing each have a different set of patents which they license, so to make an H264 codec you might need to license it from *both* licensing groups.

This is not exactly a good situation.

Anywho, there is quite a lot of pressure for the licensing bodies to work this out and form ONE group offering ONE license.

I think MPEG-LA is in the frontrunning

[Selur]

sometimes the licensing stuff really...
(don't want to get a strike for cursing :D)

[bond]

Originally posted by Stux
This is not exactly a good situation.yeah, if thats the case its really bad
still i didnt think about this possibility as both offer licenses for enc/decoders (they dont say that you cant use all technologies offered by the standard aso..)
also they offer different licenses when it comes to selling content (doesnt have something to do with the decoder/encoder side i think)