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:
Quote:
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.
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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?
