[whatwg] Google's use of FFmpeg in Chromium and Chrome Was: Re: MPEG-1 subset proposal for HTML5 video codec

[Daniel Berlin]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:29 PM, Daniel Berlin <dannyb at google.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>>>  I would, however, get in trouble for not having paid patent
>>> fees for doing so.
>> No more or less trouble than you would have gotten in had you gotten
>> it from ffmpeg instead of us, which combined with the fact that we do
>
>
> For the avoidance of doubt,
>
> Are you stating that when an end user obtains Chrome from Google they
> do not receive any license to utilize the Google distributed FFMPEG
> code to practice the patented activities essential to H.264 and/or AAC
> decoding, which Google licenses for itself?

I'm not saying that at all. I'm simply saying that any patent license
we may have does cause our distribution of ffmpeg to violate the terms
of the LGPL 2.1  Chrome as a whole is a "work that uses the library",
and as such is covered by the terms of section 6 of the LGPL 2.1. This
section provides you are allowed to distribute the work under whatever
terms you want as long as you perform one of a set of choices they
give (such as using the library as a replaceable shared lib) as well
as meet a few requirements in your distribution terms (which we do by
allowing those requirements to supersede the EULA by clause 1.2 in the
Chrome EULA)