Rival accuses BetaPlayer of copyright infringement

[TadW]

The discussion first started slowly, when Picard, famous author of the free video player BetaPlayer for Pocket PC, released the first BetaPlayer plugin supporting the Intel 2700 accelerator chip of the Axim X50v.

Then the bad thing happened.

In an insanely long discussion thread at Aximsite, member PocketTV Team first accused Picard of breaking the terms of the GPL license (mentioned earlier at MR). After a long and heated discussion, Picard decided to take the blame on himself and continue development of the plugin. Users were so happy and excited about his work that they decided to denote him Paypal money (including myself).

Then someone (could have been me ) asked Picard whether it was possible to add support for MPEG2 / SVCD to BetaPlayer. It didn't take long for PocketTV Team user to pop up again (I call him the Devil's advocate from now) and to mention the fact that MPEGLA requires software decoders to pay patent royalties for mpeg-2 and mpeg-4. Anyways, after exploring the Net, I came to the conclusing that using any unlicensed mpeg2 decoder (free or commercial) is indeed illegal. In order to be able to distribute a MPEG-2 decoding product, you must have the license from patent holders. Obviously one way to get this license is to obtain the MPEG LA patent portfolio license.

However, a free mpeg2 decoder library or plugin by itself is not an MPEG-2 decoding product until it is compiled, linked to an application and actually used by the end-user - in which case it is the end-user who is infringing the patent, not the programmer.

Have a look at 3.4 of the VideoLAN FAQ:

3.4. What about personal/commercial usage?
Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are
mostly the MPEG style codecs.
With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA (http://www.mpegla.com)) so the
user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 which it uses in
most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The
software is not sold and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying to the licensing and royalty
requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply to these licenses.
This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal joy ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for
using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet.

Obviously, while this sounds good, it is not an official answer by MPEG LA regarding this matter. Considering that the libmpeg2 project is several years old, used by a dozen well-known applications for MPEG2 decoding, and yet has not run into any legal trouble, I don't see how a MPEG2 plugin for BetaPlayer would make any difference. After all, it is the end-user who decides whether he wants to install and use the plugin or not.

And then I stumbled over today's interview at msmobiles, where PocketTV calls Betaplayer "an illegal hack" due to a) patent infridgement and b) stolen code. It saddens me deeply to see someone like PocketTV desperately vituperating someone elses work without showing definite proof.

Is it just a coincidence that user PocketTV represents MpegTV LLC, who develops PocketTV, another video player for Pocket PC, which is not freeware and lacks some of the more advanced features of BetaPlayer?

[PocketTV Team]

Originally Posted by TadW

Is it just a coincidence that user PocketTV represents MpegTV LLC, who develops PocketTV, another video player for Pocket PC, which is not freeware and lacks some of the more advanced features of BetaPlayer?

Unfortunately the story posted on your site is distorted and inaccurate. Here are some corrections:

- PocketTV Classic *is* Freeware, and it has many advanced features, including support for VGA, support for hardware acceleration (2700G, ATI), support for http streaming, frame capture, etc).

- The developer of Betaplayer did recognize that he used source code that was developed and copyrighted by other developers (that was the point we raised), and he did the right thing: Betaplayer now correctly lists the authors of all the copyrighted code used in Betaplayer. That was the subject of your article, and Betaplayer did correct it.

- All the legal issues related to Betaplayer using technology that is subject to patent royalties (MPEG-4, MP3, MPEG-2,...) are something that Betaplayer and the patent holders or the organisms representing them (such as Thomson and MPEGLA) should work out. CoreCodec.org, the website backing up and distributing Betaplayer, and DivxNetworks Inc, owner of the DivX technology, may be involved in these legal issues.

[TadW]

Originally Posted by PocketTV Team

- PocketTV Classic *is* Freeware, and it has many advanced features, including support for VGA, support for hardware acceleration (2700G, ATI), support for http streaming, frame capture, etc).

Until recently (which was last week and definitely after I had made this post), Pocket TV did NOT support Intel 2700 hardware acceleration. In addition, you are misquoting me. I did not talk about PocketTV Classic, but about PocketTV, which also implies the $49.95 Enterprise Edition.

- The developer of Betaplayer did recognize that he used source code that was developed and copyrighted by other developers (that was the point we raised), and he did the right thing: Betaplayer now correctly lists the authors of all the copyrighted code used in Betaplayer. That was the subject of your article, and Betaplayer did correct it.

And what was your gripe with that? Were you one of the other developers who were affected by the missing copyright line? And again, please don't put words into my mouth. Subject of my article was not the missing copyright lines, but your accusation that Picard was not allowed to use the Intel 2700 plugin without a proper MPEG LA license.

- All the legal issues related to Betaplayer using technology that is subject to patent royalties (MPEG-4, MP3, MPEG-2,...) are something that Betaplayer and the patent holders or the organisms representing them (such as Thomson and MPEGLA) should work out. CoreCodec.org, the website backing up and distributing Betaplayer, and DivxNetworks Inc, owner of the DivX technology, may be involved in these legal issues.

And what is your part of this? How does PocketTV relate to all of this? Why your constant accusations?

[PocketTV Team]

> Until recently (which was last week and definitely after I had made this post), Pocket TV did NOT support Intel 2700 hardware acceleration.

PocketTV with Intel 2700 hardware acceleration was released about a week ago.

> In addition, you are misquoting me. I did not talk about PocketTV Classic, but about PocketTV, which also implies the $49.95 Enterprise Edition.

Your article involved Betaplayer (a freeware) and PocketTV, but it was hinting that PocketTV was not freeware:

You wrote: <<PocketTV, another video player for Pocket PC, which is not freeware>>

In fact he vast majority of people using PocketTV are using the freeware version of PocketTV, which provide an alternate choice for people playing MPEG files. Yes, there also an Enterprise Edition, which is for commercial use.

> And what was your gripe with that? Were you one of the other developers who were affected by the missing copyright line?

Are you suggesting that giving credits to others for their work is a minor detail ?

> And again, please don't put words into my mouth. Subject of my article was not the missing copyright lines, but your accusation that Picard was not allowed to use the Intel 2700 plugin without a proper MPEG LA license.

You are mixing several things:

- Missing copyright statement (Picard fixed that, to his credit).

- Closed-source Intel 2700 plugin (At one point, Picard released the Intel 2700G plugin as closed-source code, and this is not allowed by the GPL license of Betaplayer. Picard corrected this too, to his credit). This was the subject of the posting that you were refering to (by your "accused" link).

- MPEG LA license (nothing to do with Intel 2700).

> And what is your part of this? How does PocketTV relate to all of this? Why your constant accusations?

We think it's important for the entire community i.e. the users, the open-source comminity and the software industry, that everyone "play by the rules" and respect licensing terms and copyrights. Betaplayer did the right thing and they get a lot of credit for that.

The point of my previous posting was only to correct some mis-staments and inaccuracies in your article, not to start another flame war.

[TadW]

Ok, since we both don't want any flame war, I am going to stop it here. Actually I am grateful for your reply; other developers would probably not even have cared to explain their point of view.

Tad

[Bob Russell]

Thanks, TadW, for bringing this topic up, and to PocketTV Team for clarifying your position. Kudos for both of you for addressing these volatile issues in a constructive manner.

BetaPlayer is very popular, and an excellent piece of software, so this subject is close to a lot of people's hearts. But competition really helps all software improve, so we wish Pocket TV Team well, and hope to see both titles continue to prosper.