primitive
17th July 2002, 02:01
Personally, I was amazed at how lenient the MPEG-4 final licensing terms are.
For the layman, it breaks down into three things:
1. If you're not commercial, you owe nothing.
2. If you are commercial, you still don't owe that much.
3. Nobody starts owing anything to anybody until December 31, 2003. After that date, you have to pay royalties on devices you produce AFTER that date. You're not held liable for royalties you'd have paid for devices released before this date.
This is fantastic news. People have a green light to release all the MPEG-4 devices they want to until 2004 until they start to have to pay royalties. XviD gets off royalty-free, and the extremely liberal terms of this license agreement lead me to believe that the MPEG licensing group would welcome free implementations of MPEG-4; after all, XviD hurts them none -- since it's noncommercial, they wouldn't get the moneys, and if someone picks up and sells or uses XviD commercially they would get paid reguardless.
What a coup! Get them hooked on something free (XviD) and make it so that the noncommercial --> commercial bridge is relatively painless to cross. Since the licensing fees are relatively light, an MPEG-4 console player won't be any more expensive than a regular console DVD player.
And, of course, the two bigget forces in the content market today are piracy and porn. Office workers finding out that Little Johnny Broadband can download The Two Towers off the interweb and make it playable on their expensive TVs (months before it comes out on DVD) will flock to stores to pick up inexpensive console DVD / MPEG-DVD players. (Microsoft's been using this tactic for years in Asia.)
O, glorious day!
-p
For the layman, it breaks down into three things:
1. If you're not commercial, you owe nothing.
2. If you are commercial, you still don't owe that much.
3. Nobody starts owing anything to anybody until December 31, 2003. After that date, you have to pay royalties on devices you produce AFTER that date. You're not held liable for royalties you'd have paid for devices released before this date.
This is fantastic news. People have a green light to release all the MPEG-4 devices they want to until 2004 until they start to have to pay royalties. XviD gets off royalty-free, and the extremely liberal terms of this license agreement lead me to believe that the MPEG licensing group would welcome free implementations of MPEG-4; after all, XviD hurts them none -- since it's noncommercial, they wouldn't get the moneys, and if someone picks up and sells or uses XviD commercially they would get paid reguardless.
What a coup! Get them hooked on something free (XviD) and make it so that the noncommercial --> commercial bridge is relatively painless to cross. Since the licensing fees are relatively light, an MPEG-4 console player won't be any more expensive than a regular console DVD player.
And, of course, the two bigget forces in the content market today are piracy and porn. Office workers finding out that Little Johnny Broadband can download The Two Towers off the interweb and make it playable on their expensive TVs (months before it comes out on DVD) will flock to stores to pick up inexpensive console DVD / MPEG-DVD players. (Microsoft's been using this tactic for years in Asia.)
O, glorious day!
-p