[MPlayer-users] Re: thinking about mpeg4 licence etc.

[Eric Lammerts]

On Sun, 2 Jun 2002, Clemens W?chter wrote:
> gabor <gabor at realtime.sk> wrote:
> > ... there were news on slashdot and other places ( like maccentral )
> > about that the mpeg alliance ( or commitee or what's their name ) plans
> > to license mpeg4 in the following way: mpeg4 wants 0.25$ pro
> > encoder/decoder + 0.02$/hour for mpeg4 content.
>
> Hmm... how long was that ago?
>
> I searched slashdot and did not find the article you talked about.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/01/149255

> I don't know wheter this legal in every country but right now the
> lame developers have replaced every piece of source with their own
> implementation and now it seems to be entirely free. I am not a
> lawyer but as far as I know they can't forbid you your own
> implementation of mpeg4.

Patents apply to every implementation (unlike copyright). So even if
you code it from scratch, you are still bound by the patents.

> Plus those patent claims are not legal in every country. Afaik they
> are illegal in Europe, and they pretty surely are in Australia.

According to http://www.mpegla.com/l_patentlist.html, they have
patents in several European countries (but not Hungary ;-))

> So I guess very little will change for us users. And a little more
> but still quite few will for most developers.

I guess it will be the same as with mp3: Lots of people will use
it without a license, and Fraunhofer/Thomson doesn't go after them.
But if you want to make a business out of it, they will come after
you.

Eric