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> There's a small gotcha in the new MPEG LA license agreement. Footnote 17, which appears in tiny print at the very end of the summary of license terms, notes t
by laurencerowe 6y ago
> There's a small gotcha in the new MPEG LA license agreement. Footnote 17, which appears in tiny print at the very end of the summary of license terms, notes that “Annual royalty caps are not subject to the 10% limitation.” Although that sounds like a loophole, it really only affects the largest players in the market.
Cisco’s free to use h264 encoder/decoder binaries of its open source OpenH264 are a result of this license cap so potentially it could affect others if those rates rise to the point they withdraw availability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264
- aste-risk 6y agothe wikipedia page mentions that cisco pays to MPEG LA royalties on behalf of any software project that uses their precompiled binaries. How do they keep track of who downloaded their binaries and how much money they owe to MPEG LA?
- Moosdijk 6y agoI think it's internally. The article also states that the users of the code would still have to pay the royalties.
- Delk 6y agoNo, it's not only internal use, as long as it's Cisco's binary that's being distributed. That's how for example Firefox ships H.264 decoding support. The license does not cover any other binaries built from the same Cisco source code, though. The Wikipedia article is also fairly clear about this and says: "any software projects that use Cisco's source code instead of its binaries would be legally responsible for paying all royalties to MPEG LA themselves, however." (emphasis mine)
- detaro 6y agoAFAIK they pay the max amount, so it doesn't matter how many people use their binaries.