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Mozilla is Fighting for Us

Firefox



Summary: The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) goes to WIPO and Mozilla advocates Ogg

Proprietary codecs are a nasty old barrier to the adoption of Free software because they are subjected to patent law in some countries that bow to software patents. MP3 is a good example of this and it was mentioned in this new opening statement from the FSFE's President, Karsten Gerloff. He faces a harsh (hostile) crowd which is a patent maximalist, WIPO.



This week, the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents is meeting in Geneva. From FSFE’s perspective, the two most important points on the agenda are the relation between standards and patents, and limitations to patentability.

We’ll go into details in the coming days. On patents and standards, one obvious point is that Free Software runs into all sorts of problems when implementing standards that include patented technology - just think of MP3.

The discussion about limitations to what can be patented is clearly very important for Free Software. Here, the delegates at WIPO will discuss, among other things, whether there should be international rules regarding patents on software.


"FSFE [is] not mentioning software patents in their statement, swpats are absent of the WIPO report on exceptions to patent law," remarks President of the FFII on the above. Well, how about MPEG-LA?

A few days ago we explained why people should support GNU/Linux-oriented Web browsers and Firefox too (my primary browser), just not Chrome with the ugly EULA or Opera which is proprietary. Mozilla has just given more reasons to favour Firefox. Mozilla is fighting for all of us to make Ogg part of HTML5 (and Web sites that use HTML5), whereas Apple and Nokia did exactly the opposite. The previous post explained how Apple uses patents against Free software, including the GNU/Linux operating system.

Here are some items from the news (we have mentioned more items among the daily links):

Mozilla defends Firefox's HTML5 support for only Ogg Theora video

But Firefox 3.6 supports only the Ogg Theora video codec and, currently, no other codecs. Mozilla had pushed for the Ogg codec to be the default for the <video> element, but this was not supported by the HTML5 working group who decided to leave the codec unspecified in the developing standard. This means that Firefox is unable to play the YouTube and Vimeo HTML5 videos.


Mozilla buries heels on un-YouTube open video

Mozilla vice president of engineering Mike Shaver has reiterated that the open source outfit has no intention of rolling the H.264 video codec into its Firefox browser, even though the likes of YouTube and Vimeo are using the patented codec with early versions of their plug-in-free HTML5 video players.

[...]

Google is working to purchase On2 Technologies, and it looks like the Mountain View giant is interested in open sourcing the outfit's video codecs to provide a license-free option offering performance above and beyond Ogg.


HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web

Mozilla defends Firefox's HTML5 support for only Ogg Theora video

Mozilla takes on YouTube video choice

Mozilla would have to pay $5 million to license the H.264 codec from MPEG-LA, the industry group that oversees the technology, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering in a blog post, and that doing so wouldn't grant rights of those such as Linux operating system companies who build products employing Mozilla's browser.


In summary, Mozilla will not let us work for the "MPEG cartel". It deserves credit for this. Mozilla is also actively working against software patents. In a later post we will show that Ubuntu is doing controversial new things with Firefox.

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