Photo by Joi Ito

Summary: Mozilla is not afraid of MPEG-LA and it will calmly support Google's new codec; perhaps so should everyone else

MPEG-LA is a patent troll, or at least headed by one [1, 2, 3, 4]. Currently, MPEG-LA is set to face antitrust chanrges due to Nero's complaint. The only GNU/Linux company which ended up indirectly complying with MPEG-LA is Canonical [1, 2]. Mozilla has managed to avoid that parasite, even in the face of threats against Ogg support, which Firefox has had for well over a year. VP8 seems to be in the process of becoming equally free.

According to this new report, Mozilla is very confident about using VP8 while disregarding the parasites.

"Right now we think that it's totally fine to ship, or we wouldn't ship it," said Mozilla Chief Executive John Lilly. "We're really confident in our ability to ship this free of encumbrances." The VP8 patent situation is no different from the patent challenges that face any computing innovation, from search to social networking to user interfaces to browsers, he added.

MPEG-LA wants people to believe that anything that encodes/decodes video and audio will always be its own properly (intellectual 'ownership') somehow, due to software patents. MPEG-LA is just a bully, so it's better off reported or ignored. There are hopefully provisions that can shut down MPEG-LA because it not only trades in the area of codecs; MPEG-LA has become a risk to people's lives because of its business in gene patents. How inhumane. ⬆