xiphmont

A few months ago, Cisco announced they would distribute a free and fully licensed h.264 encoder/decoder blob that FOSS projects could use to support h.264. At the same time Mozilla announced we'd use the blob in Firefox. I blogged about it at the time.

That announcement was mostly about WebRTC, but there was plenty of talk about this being another step toward full MP4 playback in Firefox. Moz obviously can't do that without also supporting (and licensing) AAC, the audio half of MP4. AAC was not included in Cisco's h.264 offer, which many people noticed and Brendan confirmed on his blog.

At the end of my blog post about Cisco's plan, I suggested it might influence MPEG licensing:

"In the future, could nearly every legal copy of HEVC come as a binary blob from one Internet source under one cap? I doubt that possibility is something the MPEG LA has considered, and they may consider it now that someone is actually trying to pull it off with H.264."

Woah, damn. Did that just happen with AAC?

After Cisco's h.264 Open h.264 announcement, Via Licensing, which runs the AAC licensing pool, pulled the AAC royalty fee list off their website. Now the old royalty terms (visible here) have been replaced by a new, apparently simplified fee list that eliminates licensing sub-categories, adds a new, larger volume tier and removes all the royalty caps. Did royalty liability for AAC software implementations just become unlimited?

The new page is much shorter than the old page; Perhaps this is just an oversight or an as-yet-incomplete pricing update. Still it would be a bit odd for an organization that exists for the purpose of royalty licensing and collection to publish an inaccurate or incomplete price list.

So, who'd like to do the dirty work of following up in more detail with Via?

[update 2014-01-29]: Janko Roettgers followed up with Via Licensing, he details their response in a Google+ post. The short version is the old categories 'remain available' but 'under the new terms, products must be approved by Via before they can be reported in these categories.' In short, the caps are still there at Via's discretion. That's probably not actually much of a change; I believe Via decided what products qualified for capped pricing before as well.