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Re: RTCWeb proposal

2013-12-06 13:52:57
On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Harald Alvestrand 
<harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no>wrote:

 On 12/05/2013 08:28 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
Phil, if you had left it at that, i would not have reacted the way I did.

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/
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