[M4IF Discuss] To those concerned about MPEG- 4 Licensing ...

[William J. Fulco]

Sorry Rob (and Craig),
I addressed my little barb to the wrong person...
While I agree with Craig that there are very likely "nefarious" forces that
wish to see the MPEG-2 infrastructure continue (certainly for current
applications like DVD) - I believe that what prompted the usage fee for
MPEG-4 was "them" not wanting to lose the MPEG-2 Royalty stream for packaged
media... after all, if MPEG-4 were RF in places that MPEG-2 is RB (Royalty
Bering?) - then clearly there is an incentive to move from MPEG-2 DVDs and
such to MPEG-4 DVDs and such.  Given that most manufacturers are already
considering "net-connected" consumer electronic devices - this kind of move
would be easy to do (for some definition of the word "easy").... I think
their thinking was "How do you prevent MPEG-2 IP for things like DVDs from
becoming "useless"?  Make MPEG-4 cost "the same" " (for some definition of
"the same"...)
Anyway, I'm not the pessimist that perhaps Craig is. Capitalism has this
nasty habit of producing what "the market wants" (for some definition... )
by hook or by crook (sometimes literally in the case of a "black market").
People will get what they want...  so, while we're all quite fond of a
hard-fought international standard called MPEG-4 which will (may?) let us
all find format-nirvana - two things come to mind:
1) There never was and never will be one-algorithm-fits-all "format
nirvana" - though MPEG-4 offers hope of a greatly lessened "format war" and
2) There are similar and even better technologies out there right now - from
the "big three" - Apple, Real, MS as well as smaller players... we WILL get
our internet A/V/G/I, hot-to-trot format - and maybe we'll have to suffer
MS, Real and Apple battling out the container formats and maybe we'll have
to suffer with On2, DivX, Pulsnat, DGFX, Real, MS, Sorensen, Apple and a
dozen other garage-shops that have not yet appeared in public battling for
compression "standards" – however – IF THERE IS A MARKET DEMAND for what
MPEG-4 can do (that MPEG-2 can't) – then it WILL get satisfied... "The
market" is messy but it almost always works - eventually (unless big
government entity outlaws the "correct" solution - and even then it often
still works).
Let me note a quick example...
NAPLS (North American Presentation Level Syntax) – was THE "standard" that
was going to give us something fabulous like France's MINITEL – a
"wonderful" online-system for ordering stuff and getting weather reports and
ordering theater ticks and making dinner reservations at the local
restaurant... NAPLS was at last going to allow North-America to "catch up"
with the technologically-advanced French and their "graphical" terminals at
home. Telco-supplied, government-approved "system”... darn if that just
didn't catch on and got superceded by some little
college-kid/physicist-hack-document-sharing-system that was messy, and
terrible, and barely standardized system called – the world-wide-web... yes
the web happened because there was an SGML knockoff called HTML/HTTP – but
that "standard" moved quickly etc etc. Another example – MUSE was going to
be the dominant HDTV format world-wide... etc etc.
My point is there are ALWAYS ways to get what we TRULY WANT (willing to pay
for somehow) and while I think that MPEG-LA mess runs the risk of relegating
MPEG-4 to virtual irrelevancy - if it does – that does not mean we don't get
all the MPEG-4 goodies we want... it just means we get them in a different
way with a different time-frame.
What did Henry Ford say "If I built what people asked for, I would have
invented a faster horse. I built what people really wanted"...
The competitors of MPEG-4 standard are not "evil" - they're just, well,
competitors - and if MPEG-LA is so stupid as to kill MPEG-4 - then so be it-
we'll live, we'll survive. We’ll still get our Net-connected DVD-players and
downloadable music will still occur and movies on demand will still come to
pass and net-porn will still be shot and distributed and wireless web-cams
will still be built. It’s just that it might not be wrapped-up in a handy
little "standard" - all neat and tidy like us "knowledgeable" engineers and
scientists and business people might like. And it might not happen as
quickly - and people that make programmable video-processors will have an
advantage over the cheaper fixed-algorithm processors... ya de ya di ya
di...
Fear not the future will arrive no matter what way this goes. Fight the good
fight - try to convince the IP holders and the (I believe protectors of the
status-quo) MPEG-LA folks to come to their senses... but don't worry the
world will not come to an end if MPEG-4 goes the way of H.263 (useful in a
limited set of applications) or NAPLS (useful in NO applications).
And as far as wanting to avoid "submarine patents" - is it my imagination or
am I remembering correctly that the concept of motion compensation is
subject to IP licenses - so any Codec that uses ME/MC can theoretically be
nuked?
I'm tellin' ya - go look at your local library for 20yo technology for video
compression - there's lots of useful stuff there - LOL
++Bill
William J. Fulco
wjf   NetworkXXIII.com
310-927-4263 Cell
---------------------------------
Logic: When you absolutely, positively
have to refute every fallacy in the room.