Has Blizzard made Xvid legal?

[fibbingbear]

I recently went to Blizzard's Starcraft2 web site and noticed that they now use Xvid to encode their movies:

http://www.starcraft2.com/movies.xml

My understanding is that Xvid is still not legal in the United States since the Xvid team has not paid royalties to MPEGLA.

Does anyone know what's up with this? (Blizzard is a US company)

P.S. Sorry if this question has been answered, but I searched through the forum and couldn't find anything.

[ChronoCross]

As I understand it Blizzard could use the xvid codec so long as they pay the necessary fees to the MpegLA.

Maybe I'm wrong but that would be my best guess. It would mean that only blizzard could use it publicly. everyone else would still have to pay mpegla

[fibbingbear]

Hi ChronoCross. Interesting point, but it does raise one more question:

On the Starcraft2 website, they link to the Xvid binaries so that people can decode the video. The xvid binaries are the standard binaries, not a special only-plays-Blizzard-video-binary.

My understanding of MPEGLA is that you pay to get a particular program licensed. Doesn't that mean that they've also paid for every Xvid binary, since they're telling people to go and download Xvid to decode their video?

Any other thoughts? :) I'm really curious about this from a legal standpoint :)

[Brother John]

Blizzard don’t supply the Xvid binary themselves. They only link to third party sites where you can get the binary. So no royalties here. Also, MPEG LA’s presentation (http://www.mpegla.com/m4v/m4vweb.ppt) mentions no royalties for content shorter than 12 minutes. Don’t know if this applies to the Starcraft video.

Overall it seems that Blizzard might not have to pay any royalties at all. Of course this was just a casual glance at that presentation. IANAL and might be wrong.

[Julio C]

I didn't know Xvid was illegal or I never question it.

[Dark Shikari]

I didn't know Xvid was illegal or I never question it.It isn't. Its just that many uses of it require paying royalties (especially if you're using it to create and distribute very large numbers of videos).

[Hard Core Rikki]

IIRC, commercial usage of the patented algos of mpeg-4 requires paying either royalties or fixed licence fees. Unless properly licenced, commercial usage is not authorized, and I think it would be the same, whether they were using Xvid or Divx (not unlike what happened with MP3, whether you used the official ISO implementation or LAME's )

[Julio C]

Oh ok, now that makes sense to me.

[xruntime]

I never knew either you need to pay royalties...that's gay...