Google gets VP8 'protection' from MPEG LA, signs licence deal


Google gets VP8 'protection' from MPEG LA, signs licence deal

Swapnil Bhartiya's picture
Google has agreed to pay a licence fee to MPEG LA, LLC for techniques which they say may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders.
With this licence agreement Google also gains the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity.
The advocates of open standard and free software are saddened by this move. Jan Wildeboer, a Red Hat evangelist says, "Le Sigh. Google pays for "protection"  by MPEG-LA. Including downstream license to make sure the openness can be kept. While this is a good move, I am saddened that we need to do such stuff nowadays."
Another relieving outcome of this deal is that MPEG LA has also agreed to discontinue its effort to form a VP8 patent pool which could have put the technology that Google bought and open sourced at risk.
Allen Lo, Google's deputy general counsel for patents said, "This is a significant milestone in Google's efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format."
What this deal also means is that the opponents like Microsoft now have no valid excuse to not support VP8.

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