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Comment by Nelson
by Nelson on Sun 10th Mar 2013 15:20 UTC
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H264 licenses are not covered under commercial usage that includes subscription video in excess of 100,000 users, at which point, the license fee is not to exceeed $0.02 per title.

It is worth putting into context "End-users" here, end users cannot be targeted by the MPEG LA for patent litigation unless they are part of the distribution chain of the unlicensed publication -- in other words, if you're just hitting play on a video on the web, the extent of your liability is limited by United States patent law.
harass the hell out of end users while patent trolls
Ironically, the bar for claiming damages against individuals is significantly higher for patents than for, say, copyright which is why the RIAA is free to are exactly that, trolls, if they start to go after users.

Basically, if you have video on which you make profit exceeding minimum thresholds, you pay a ridiculously small licensing fee.

At that point, it is questionable if its still honest to classify these people as normal end users -- given that that much revenue makes the license insignificant comparatively.

There is a distinction between content owner and content distributors, even if under certain circumstances they may be one in the same.

I don't really think this opinion piece is grounded in reality with regards to the situation with VP8, FOSSPatents goes into the issue pretty well:

While the MPEG LA might have gotten their share, things remain more dubious for VP8 because there are likely legitimate stake owners with patents that are not part of the deal with the MPEG LA and are not obligated to any FRAND terms.

One such example is Nokia, that the day of the agreement, launched an offensive against HTC for patents it believes that VP8 infringes.

To claim that VP8 is more safe than H264 is ludicrous.

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