[whatwg] The issue of interoperability of the <video> element

[Geoffrey Sneddon]

On 25 Jun 2007, at 13:21, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote:

> According to Wikipedia,
>
> "AT&T is trying to sue companies such as Apple Inc. over alleged
> MPEG-4 patent infringement.[1][2][3]"
>
> I would be fascinated to see a statement from Apple, Inc. regarding  
> this.

Seeming they are already under risk from what they already support,  
what advantage do Apple get by supporting more codecs, therefore  
opening up themselves to further risks?

> It's also quite interesting that different portions of MPEG-4,
> including different sections of video and audio are licensed
> separately, so what this means is that any vendor willing to support
> MPEG-4 for <video> and <audio> has to locate every patent holder and
> pay them.

No, they don't, it all goes through MPEG-LA.

> Oh, and will you look at this, Apple, Inc. holds one the patents!  US
> 6,134,243 [4].  So Apple gets money for every single license sold.
> How nice.  They are attempting to lock vendors into MPEG-4 and get
> money from licenses in the process.  Apple, Inc. is no better than
> Microsoft.

So a company which owns a patent on a standard that can bought and  
read at freedom is just as bad as a company which owns a patent on a  
standard that has absolutely no public documentation? Also, a large  
part of this topic has been around H.264, Apple holds no known  
patents affecting H.264.


- Geoffrey Sneddon