[advocacy] Fwd: MPEG LA to Charge for MPEG4 Streaming in Europe

Wed Feb 20 03:16:02 PST 2002

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
Subject: MPEG LA to Charge for MPEG4 Streaming in Europe
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 11:59:03 +0100 (CET)
From: sf at fermigier.com
To: daniel at linuxuser.co.uk

<p>               MPEG LA to Charge for MPEG4 Streaming in Europe
      Patent Tax Threatens the Freedom of Movie Picture Artists in
 Europe

   EuroLinux Alliance <petition.EuroLinux.org>

                           For immediate Release

   Paris, Munich, Amsterdam - 2002-02-20 - EuroLinux has been
 informed by Larry Horn, Vice President for Licensing at the MPEG
 association, that "the patents that will constitute the MPEG-4
 Visual Patent Portfolio License support the charging of royalties on
 the use of MPEG-4 Visual streams in Europe" and that a license
 should be available within several months.

   MPEG LA is a group of large corporations which control the MPEG
   standards through a large patent portfolio. MPEG LA includes
 notceably Canon, Inc., Fujitsu, General Instrument Corp., GE
 Technology Development, Inc., Hitachi, Ltd., KDDI Corporation,
 Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation,
 Philips, Samsung, Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., Scientific Atlanta,
 Sony, Toshiba, and Victor Company of Japan, Limited. [1]

   MPEG LA strategy consists in charging all possible uses of MPEG4
   technologies wordwide and to block the diffusion of independently
   developped innovations in the field of video software technology.
 In particular, MPEG LA is charging 0.02 USD per hour of compressed
 MPEG4, which is actually more than the copyright royalties most
 movie writers receive.

   The MPEG LA strategy leads to levying a tax on all cultural goods
 and is a typical example of the way patents on Internet standards
 are a tool for private taxing of all economic activities.

   MPEG LA is not the only group of companies trying to patent common
   Internet standards and create new forms of taxes managed by
 private interests. Organisations such as the W3C or the IETF, under
 the influence of large IT companies, are also starting to accept
 patents on Internet standards.

   "Patents on Internet standards have absolutely no economic
   justification since the economic value of a standard is related to
 the number of its users, not to the R&D spent to develop the
 standard or its technical quality." says Bernard Lang, Directeur de
 Recherche at INRIA. "Also, Internet standards are extremely cheap to
 develop. Corporate Members of the EuroLinux Alliance have for
 example developped innovative fractal based digital video software
 in less than 3 months."

   However, and although all economic studies show that software
 patents harm software innovation [3, 4, 6, 7, 8], software patents
 on Internet standards are likely to be legalised by the European
 Commission according to current informations on the proposed
 directive [9]. It would give control to a few large corporations on
 the whole digital culture and threaten European cultural diversity.

The MPEG LA Email to EuroLinux

Subject: RE: Submit Your Question to MPEGLA
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 10:54:29 -0700
From: "Larry Horn"
To: XXXX

Hello, XXXX.

Thanks for your question.  The patents that will constitute the
 MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License support the charging of
 royalties on the use of MPEG-4 Visual streams in Europe.  Details of
 the actual license agreement are still being worked out, however,
 and a license may not be available for several more months.

Regards,
Larry Horn
Vice President, Licensing

References

   [0] Apple Delays QuickTime 6 Over Proposed MPEG-4 Licenses -
   http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/13/041234&mode=thread

   [1] MPEG-LA - http://www.mpegla.com/l_patentlist.html

   [2] European Software Patent Horror Gallery -
   http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/mupli/index.en.html

   [3] What is behind the recent surge in patenting? Samuel Kortum,
 Josh Lerner. Research Policy 28. 1999. Elesevier

   [4] Abstraction oriented property of software and its relation to
   patentability. Tetsuo Tamai. Information and Software Technology.
   1998. Elsevier.

   [5] Juridical Coup at the European Patent Office -
   http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr14.html

   [6] Software Patentability with Compensatory Regulation: a Cost
   Evaluation. Jean Paul Smets and Hartmut Pilch. Upgrade February
 2002 http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/pleji/
   http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2001/6/up2-6Smets.pdf

   [7] Fraunhofer Study about the Economic Effects of Software
 Patents. Micro and Macroeconomic Implications of the Patentability
 of Software Innovations. German Federal Ministry Economics and
 Technology. November 2001.

 http://www.bmwi.de/Homepage/Politikfelder/Technologiepolitik/Technol
ogiepolitik.jsp#softwarepatentstudie
 http://www.bmwi.de/Homepage/download/technologie/Softwarepatentstudi
e_E.pdf

   [8] Stimulating competition and innovation in the information
 society. Conseil Général des Mines. September 2000. -
   http://www.pro-innovation.org

   [9] Collusion Discovered between BSA and European Commission -
   http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr18.html

About EuroLinux - www.EuroLinux.org

   The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an
   open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations
   united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software
 Culture based on Open Standards, Open Competition, Linux and Open
 Source Software. Companies, members or supporters of EuroLinux
 develop or sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses
 for operating systems such as Linux, MacOS or Windows.

   The EuroLinux Alliance launched on 2000-06-15 an electronic
 petition to protect software innovation in Europe. The EuroLinux
 petition has received so far massive support from more than 100.000
 European citizens, 2000 corporate managers and 300 companies.

   Press Contacts

   France & Europe: Jean-Paul Smets <jp at smets.com> +33-6 62 05 76 14
   Germany & Europe: Hartmut Pilch <phm at ffii.org> +49-89 127 89 608
   Denmark and Northern Europe: Anne Østergaard <aoe at sslug.dk>
   Belgium: Nicolas Pettiaux <nicolas.pettiaux at openbe.org>
   Netherlands: Luuk van Dijk <lvd at mndmttr.nl>

   Permanent URL for this PR

   http://petition.EuroLinux.org/pr/pr18.html

Legalese

   Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
   All other trademarks and copyrights are owned by their respective
   companies.

-------------------------------------------------------

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'advocacy-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.