On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Harald Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Phil, if you had left it at that, i would not have reacted the way I did.On 12/05/2013 08:28 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
The specific reaction was to:
a) You suggesting that a codec was encumbered without bothering with enough fact-checking to get the name of the codec right.
I did check, I just got the name confused with something else in a couple of posts.
What I said was not that VP8 was legitimately encumbered but that the probability of a lawsuit is independent of the merits and is at or approaching 1.
In one recent case I discovered prior art from the days when IBM still made computers with vacuum tubes but the case is continuing. The situation is terribly depressing. I would very much like to use EC encryption and I am pretty certain that there are techniques that are unencumbered. But I can't sell them to a customer because that would expose the customer to a serious litigation risk.
And even if there was no litigation risk relating to VP8 the parties that would have to come to agreement are currently locked in a mutual patent litigation meltdown. Which means that the IETF would have to take sides to come to a decision.
b) You proposing specifically that MJPEG is a better solution to propose than the multiple maybe-royalty-free ones that have already been proposed in the WG (H.261, H.263 and Theora), without any justification for why you think this choice is either technically superior to or more IPR-proof than the others that have been proposed.
I did not say that they were technically superior. In fact I said that technical superiority was not essential. It probably isn't IPR proof either. But given that every party that has a Web browser has already implemented JPEG, the risk of additional IPR exposure for motion JPEG would be minimal.
One of the ways to get people to agreement is to first exclude all the proposals that are non-starters and then put an unpleasant option on the table that does meet the necessary criteria. The participants can then accept the unpleasant choice or they can come up with a less unpleasant one. My original proposal was going to be animated GIF.
As far as the rest of the IETF is concerned, forcing RTCWEB to live with no MTI codec or motion jpeg seems a lot less unpleasant than have a WG decide to unilaterally set a precedent for future IPR issues.
I certainly can't see the issue being decidable by a vote in IETF, at best that is going to be ignored, at worst it causes the IETF to lose it's neutrality as the industry patent battles become increasingly nasty.
If there is going to be a vote it has to be taken by the parties that would be bearing liability. My opinion on the encumbrance status of VP8 is irrelevant and so is the opinion of the participants in RTCWEB. The only opinions that would matter would be those of counsel for Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, HTC, etc. Perhaps at some point we will have established a framework for settling IP disputes in the industry in a fashion that allows those people to sit at the same table together. But that is not where I think we are at today.
Website: http://hallambaker.com/