Subject: Re: [rtcweb] H.261

From: Basil Mohamed Gohar <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 15:04:39 -0500

On 11/27/2013 05:04 PM, Ron wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:42:25PM -0800, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:39 PM, cowwoc <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>> Either you misunderstood my question or I am misunderstanding your answer.
>>> I'm asking what prevents us from bundling Cisco's binary as part of our
>>> installer or image?
>>
>> What makes it a Cisco product is that it comes from Cisco, not that you
>> make a bunch of copies and send it to people.
> 
> So, if I buy a video camera with H.264 support from some local store,
> are you saying that it's the retailer responsible for purchasing the
> licence?  Or maybe it's the sweat-shop fabricator that's responsible
> for this?  Who did my camera "come from" in this case?
> 
> And are you by extension saying that I'm responsible for a 'unit'
> every time that Cisco binary is copied from disk storage to RAM?
> What if the disk it's on is in a NAS?
> 
> Juries in Texas are going to love this.
> 
>   Ron

Sorry, I missed this whole thread of discussion, but I think I know the
answer to this, not that I think it matters a whole bunch.

The camera manufacturer only has a transitive license to its customers
for private, non-commercial usage, and that's exactly what it says in
the discussion.

This, by the way, is exactly and only the usages that will be allowed by
the Cisco binary, unless MPEG-LA has changed their transitive licensing
practices since I last investigated this.

-- 
Libre Video
http://librevideo.org

---

From: Randell Jesup <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2013 04:25:20 -0500

> practices since I last investigated this.

IANAPL - In theory these restricted "personal" licenses can't be used 
for something like recording H.264 DVDs for sale, or for a video 
included in a for-profit ("commercial") blog post, can't be used in a 
DVD player to decode H.264, etc.  (This last part is something that 
MPEG-LA is very concerned with protecting, I believe, due to how the 
licenses are arranged).

Use of the Cisco module in a (commercial) conferencing server would 
(IMHO, IANAPL) likely stray onto the wrong side of the legal line (and 
also might not fall into the 100K units waiver if youy dealt with 
MPEG-LA directly).  Use in a corporation for video calls might 
theoretically stray over the line, but in a way that is done constantly 
by Windows for example (IIRC Windows has this "private, non-commercial" 
clause for H.264).

I think if you want to invoke the 100K units bit, you have to sign a 
deal with MPEG-LA, and count units, and agree to audits, etc.  But I 
haven't read their terms in a long time.

-- 
Randell Jesup -- rjesup a t mozilla d o t com