

Canonical clarifies its H.264 licence - ukdm
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Canonical-clarifies-its-H-264-licence-993182.html

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alecco
The H.264 problem looks just like the first stages of the LZW patent fiasco
all over again. People think it's OK and it gets widely adopted. But at some
point lawyers will start sending letters. Given history on the subject, the
questions are "when" and "who", not "if."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement)

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driekken
It's dangerous for the web's videos to rely on a format for which royalties
are expected to be paid. Hopefully Google will release the VP8 codec as a
royalty-free alternative (as rumour has it) and it becomes the standard.

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charltones
tl;dr Canonical have a H.264 license agreement, but that doesn't mean Ubuntu
users are covered by it. You're only covered if you buy some hardware that
comes with Ubuntu AND the hardware manufacturer explicitly tells you that they
have licensed H.264 (and possibly other codecs) from Canonical.

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alanh
This all goes away when software patents do, right?

Something I haven't heard much about lately is x264. Is a H.264 license
required to use x264 in some situations?

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devinj
Isn't that how patents work? You have to pay up no matter who implements it,
as long as it is patented? (copyright, on the other hand, depends on whether
your implementation is a derivative work of or copies etc. their
implemenation).

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vondur
It would be interesting if Caonincal would release a version of Ubuntu with
the proprietary software installed for a low price. I wonder how many people
would pay for it?

