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> [0] For context: The EU competition regulators believe AOM may have bullied people into royalty-free licensing. This could either be read as "Google screwed u
by phh 4y ago
> [0] For context: The EU competition regulators believe AOM may have bullied people into royalty-free licensing. This could either be read as "Google screwed up their legal research" or the EU deciding that reciprocal royalty-free patent licensing itself needs to die.
Sounds like you're assuming that the issue is with AV1 itself. My personal guess is that the issue is rather that some AOM company could coerce some patent-owner companies into using AV1, and thus "relinquishing their patents".
Stupid obviously unreal example: If Apple require iPhone resellers to display Apple's advertisement from AV1 codec. Then resellers have the choice to either stop selling Apple products, or give their patents for free to AOM. If that was real, it could be considered an abuse of Apple's dominant position.
- kmeisthax 4y agoThe issue would be with AV1 itself, because the investigation is about standards-essential patents (SEP) and the whole point of AV1 is to be royalty-free. If the EU decides that AOM violated competition rules to get blanket licenses to AV1 SEP, then that would (presumably) wipe away the SEP owner's obligations to reciprocally license those patents to new implementers. Then we're right back in the same overlapping-patent-pool hell that made H.265 so ludicrously expensive to license.