Bonum Certa Men Certa

HEVC Cartel is Not News, Only the Names of Backers and the Costs Are New

HEVC backerSummary: A few remarks on and a roundup of recent articles about HEVC, which we first wrote about in spring

ABOUT a week ago, well before the FOSS community began talking about it (apparently a hot topic over the weekend), we had spotted the latest news about HEVC, a cartel that we first heard about several months ago, well before it had a widely-recognised (for notoriety) name and a now-notorious press release (the respective Wikipedia page goes well over 2 years back, there are semi-official Web sites etc. so it's not exactly news). Some people in the FOSS/multimedia world knew what was happening, but the details were rather vague at the time. We wrote about this back in April when Monty (the Ogg guy) mentioned it by name and noted the similarities to MPEG-LA. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) had been turning into a patent parasite with its own 'official' troll. New patent cartels such as HEVC basically pile up yet more fees (like royalty stacking) and some of the earlier reports said that this one cartel alone (irrespective of the rest) wants "0.5% Of Every Content Owner/Distributor’s Gross Revenue For Higher Quality Video"" [1, 2]. To quote some background: "In March, a new group named HEVC Advance announced the formation of a new patent pool [see: New HEVC Patent Pool Launches Creating Confusion & Uncertainly In The Market] with the goal of compiling over 500 patents pertaining to HEVC technology. The pool of patent holders, which is “expected” to include GE, Technicolor, Dolby, Philips, and Mitsubishi Electric has just announced their royalty rates and are going directly after content owners and CE manufacturers. HEVC Advance wants 0.5% of content owners attributable gross revenue for each HEVC Video type. To put in perspective how unjust and unfair their licensing terms are, they want 0.5% of Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and every other content owner/distributor’s revenue, as it pertains to HEVC usage. Considering that most content owners and distributors plan to convert all of their videos over time to use the new High Efficiency Video Coding compression standard, companies like Facebook, Netflix and others would have to pay over $100M a year in licensing payments. The licensing terms apply to all content services that get revenue from advertising, subscription and PPV – which pretty much equals every content owner, OTT provider, broadcaster, sports league, satellite broadcaster and cable provider you can think of."



"A New H.265 Patent Pool Is Causing Concerns" was the headline from Phoronix (a couple of days ago). A lot of people link to that right now. Actually, it's not news. The site said that "[t]his H.265 patent pool is expected to be backed by GE, Dolby, Philips, and other names. The group, HEVC Advance, is interested in 0.5% of gross revenue from content owners for each HEVC video type. Some details on this patent pool can be found via the Streaming Media Blog. "

Well, software patents continue to haunt multimedia and many articles about this [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (it was big new last week) did too little -- if anything -- to emphasise the horrible impact this can have on Free software.

According to the press release, this entity is "an independent licensing administrator". Cartel is what it really is. Even Microsoft Peter, promoter of other such patent cartels (like the ones Microsoft is in), said that this one "threatens to derail 4K HEVC video streaming".

The bottom line is that this is hardly news. It goes back to spring and well beforehand (depending on whether one talks about the patents or the formats/methods), but now we know more about the monetary demands. HEVC workarounds may be needed, just like WebM and Ogg (as Free software substitutes by which to bypass the MPEG cartel). We are likely to hear a lot more about HEVC in years to come.

Recent Techrights' Posts

[Meme] One Person, Singular Pronoun
Abusing people into abusing the English language is very poor diplomacy
New Article From Richard Stallman Explains Why He Says He and She for Unknown Person (Not 'They')
"Nowadays I use gender-neutral singular pronouns for a person whose gender I don't know"
 
Gemini Not Deflated Yet (Soon Turning 5!)
Gemini numbers still moving up, the protocol will turn five next summer
Links 30/11/2023: Belated End of Henry Kissinger and 'Popular Science' Shuts Online Magazine
Links for the day
Site Priorities and Upcoming Improvements
pages are served very fast
Ending Software Patents in Recent Years (Software Freedom Fighters MIA)
not a resolved issue
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 29, 2023
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Links 30/11/2023: Rushing Patent Cases With Shorter Trial Scheme (STS), Sanctions Not Working
Links for the day
Links 30/11/2023: Google Purging Many Accounts and Content (to Save Money), Finland Fully Seals Border With Russia
Links for the day
Lookout, It's Outlook
Outlook is all about the sharing!
Updated A Month Ago: Richard Stallman on Software Patents as Obstacles to Software Development
very recent update
The 'Smart' Attack on Power Grid Neutrality (or the Wet Dream of Tiered Pricing for Power, Essentially Punishing Poorer Households for Exercising Freedom Like Richer Households)
The dishonest marketing people tell us the age of disservice and discrimination is all about "smart" and "Hey Hi" (AI) as in algorithms akin to traffic-shaping in the context of network neutrality
Links 29/11/2023: VMware Layoffs and Too Many Microsofters Going Inside Google
Links for the day
Is BlueMail a Client of ZDNet Now?
Let's examine what BlueMail does to promote itself
Just What LINUX.COM Needed After Over a Month of Inactivity: SPAM SPAM SPAM (Linux Brand as a Spamfarm)
It's not even about Linux
Microsoft “Discriminated Based on Sexuality”
Relevant, as they love lecturing us on "diversity" and "inclusion"...
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 28, 2023
IRC logs for Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Media Cannot Tell the Difference Between Microsoft and Iran
a platform with back doors
Links 28/11/2023: New Zealand's Big Tobacco Pivot and Google Mass-Deleting Accounts
Links for the day
Justice is Still the Main Goal
The skulduggery seems to implicate not only Microsoft
OpenBSD Says That Even on Linux, Wayland Still Has a Number of Rough Edges (But IBM Wants to Make X Extinct)
IBM tries to impose unready software on users
[Teaser] Next Week's Part in the Series About Anti-Free Software Militants
an effort to 'cancel' us and spy on us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Permacomputing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Professor Eben Moglen on How Social Control Media Metabolises Humans and Constraints Freedom of Thought
Nothing of value would be lost if all these data-harvesting giants (profiling people) vanished overnight
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 27, 2023
IRC logs for Monday, November 27, 2023
When Microsoft Blocks Your Access to Free Software
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." [Chicago Sun-Times]
Techrights Statement on 'Cancel Culture' Going Out of Control
relates to a discussion we had in IRC last night
Stuff People Write About Linux
revisionist pieces
Links 28/11/2023: Rosy Crow 1.4.3 and Google Drive Data Loss
Links for the day