WebM Project Attracts Support For Cross-Licensing

The WebM Project has moved into interesting territory with the launch of a cross-licensing agreement initiative.

WebM is an open source video-streaming file format that was devised by founder members of the project group, Google, Matroska and the Xiph.Org Foundation. When it was launched a year ago by project members, the format was immediately integrated with the Opera browser, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Dipping In The Patent Pool

Now the project is growing with the launch of the WebM Community Cross-Licence (CCL) initiative which has brought 17 companies together around a promise to share intellectual property which has a bearing on developing the format. This brings together patents held by AMD, Cisco, LG Electronics, Logitech, Samsung, Texas Instruments and others.

“CCL members are joining this effort because they realise that the entire web ecosystem – users, developers, publishers, and device makers – benefits from a high-quality, community developed, open-source media format,” said Google’s Matt Frost, senior business product manager for the WebM Project.

The format is intended to be a royalty-free alternative to the proprietary H.264 standard used by Microsoft and Apple in their HTML5-based browsers. WebM started life as VP8 video which was developed by On2 Technologies until early last year when the company was acquired by Google.

The launch of the royalty-free WebM was a threat to the H.264 format and its proponents formed a patent pool, MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG-LA) in February. On the face of it, MPEG-LA is a similar patent-sharing group to the CCL to reduce the licensing fees involved in H.264 but opponents see it as something darker.

Patents Ring-Fenced

The patent pooling of MPEG-LA is seen as Apple, Microsoft and their supporters effectively ring-fencing the patents around their standard. This would also allow them to attack competing media formats with patent charges, thus undermining the royalty-free nature of initiatives like WebM.

In an atmosphere where patent protection has brought to life patent “trolls” – companies that guard the patents of others and profit by suing anyone deemed to have contravened any of the patents – it is good to see proprietary companies sharing freely in a non-adversarial way to allow innovation to flourish, but it can also be used as a weapon to hamstring competitors.

The WebM Project is trying to spike the big guns of the MPEG-LA patent pool by embracing its own pool of patent holders. This will help to keep WebM royalty-free but there could still be patent litigation ahead as MPEG-LA rifles through its 800 patent cards to find an ace that will beat the cards held by WebM – and WebM shuffles through its pack of patents to find its own trump card.