by kmeisthax | 2025-08-07 21:12:41+00:00
> and it happened under his watch.

More context for this: Chiariglione has been extremely vocal that FRAND patent royalties are entirely necessary for the development of video compression tools, and believes royalty-free standards outpacing the ones that cost money represents the end of innovation in video codecs.

To be clear, Chiariglione isn't opposed to royalty-free standards at all, he just wants them to be deliberately worse so that people who need better compression will pay independent researchers for it. His MPEG actually wound up trying to make such a standard: IVC. You've never heard of MPEG IVC because Samsung immediately claimed ownership over it and ISO patent policy does not allow MPEG to require notice of what specific patents to remove so long as the owner agrees to negotiate a license with a patent pool.

You might think at this point that Chiariglione is on the side of the patent owners, but he's actually not. In fact, it's specifically those patent owners that pushed him out of MPEG.

In the 90s, patent owners were making bank off MPEG-2 royalties, but having trouble monetizing anything newer. A patent pool never actually formed for H.263, and the one for MPEG-4 couldn't agree on a royalty free rate for Internet streaming[0]. H.264 practically is royalty free for online video, but that only happened because Google bought On2[1] and threatened to make YouTube exclusively serve VP8. The patent owners very much resent this state of affairs and successfully sabotaged efforts at MPEG to make dedicated royalty-free codecs.

The second and more pressing issue (to industry, not to us) is the fact that H.265 failed to form a single patent pool. There's actually three of them, thanks to skulduggery by Access Advance to force people to pay for the same patent license twice by promising a sweetheart licensing deal[2] to Samsung. I'm told H.266 is even more insane, mostly because Access Advance is forcing people to buy licenses in a package deal to cover up the fact that they own very little of H.266.

Chiariglione is only pro-patent-owner in the narrow sense that he believes research needs to be 'paid for'. His attempt to keep patent owners honest got him sidelined and marginalized in ISO, which is why he left. He's actually made his own standards organization, with blackjack and hookers^Wartificial intelligence. MPAI's patent policy actually requires companies agree to 'framework licenses' - i.e. promise to actually negotiate with MPAI's own patent pool specifically. No clue if they've actually shipped anything useful.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Internet video industry coalesced around Google and Xiph's AV1 proposal. They somehow manage to do without direct royalty payments for AV1, which to me indicates that this research didn't need to be 'paid for' after all. Though, the way Chiariglione talks about AV1, you'd think it's some kind of existential threat to video encoding...

[0] Practically speaking, this meant MPEG-4 ASP was predominantly used by pirates, as legit online video sites that worked in browsers were using Flash based players, and Flash only supported H.263 and VP6.

[1] The company that made VP3 (Theora) and VP6

[2] The idea is that Samsung and other firms are "net implementer" companies. They own some of H.265, but they need to license the rest of it from MPEG-LA. So Access Advance promised those companies a super-low rate on the patents they need if they all pulled out of MPEG-LA, and they make it up by overcharging everyone else, including making them pay extra if they'd already gotten licenses from MPEG-LA before the Access companies pulled out of it.