Royalty-free (RF) material subject to

copyright Copyright is a type of intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. ...

or other

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of ...

rights may be used without the need to pay

royalties A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset o ...

license fees

for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales.

Computer standards

Many computer industry standards, especially those developed and submitted by industry consortiums or individual companies, involve royalties for the actual implementation of these standards. These royalties are typically charged on a "per port"/"per device" basis, where the manufacturer of end-user devices has to pay a small fixed fee for each device sold, and also include a substantial annual fixed fee. With millions of devices sold each year, the royalties can amount to several millions of dollars, which is a significant burden for the manufacturer. Examples of such royalties-based standards include IEEE 1394,

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a audio/video for transmitting data and compressed or uncompressed data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a , to a compatible , , , or device. HDMI is a digital replacement for s ...

HDMI

, and H.264/

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working group A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activit ...

-4 AVC. Royalty-free standards do not include any "per-port" or "per-volume" charges or annual payments for the actual implementation of the standard, even though the text of the actual specification is typically protected by copyright and needs to be purchased from the standards body. Most

open standard An open standard is a standard Standard may refer to: Flags * Colours, standards and guidons * Standard (flag), a type of flag used for personal identification Norm, convention or requirement * Standard (metrology), an object that bears a de ...

s are royalty-free, and many proprietary standards are royalty-free as well. Examples of royalty-free standards include

DisplayPort DisplayPort (DP) is a digital display interface developed by a consortium of PC and chip manufacturers and standardized by the Video Electronics Standards Association VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an ...

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller A video display controller or VDC (also regularly called display engine, display interface) is an integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also ...

VGA

VP8 VP8 is an open format, open and royalty-free Video coding format, video compression format created by On2 Technologies as a successor to VP7 and owned by Google from 2010. In May 2010, after the purchase of On2 Technologies, Google provided an ir ...

, and

Matroska The Matroska Multimedia Container is a free, open-standard container format, a file format ogg-file: 154 kilobytes. A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are use ...

Photography and illustrations

photography Photography is the art Art is a diverse range of (products of) human activities involving creative imagination to express technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of ...

and the

illustration An illustration is a decoration, interpretation or visual explanation of a text, concept or process, designed for integration in print and digital published media, such as poster A poster is a temporary promotion of an idea, product, or even ...

industry, it refers to a

license where the user has the right to use the picture without many restrictions based on one-time payment to the licensor. The user can therefore use the image in several projects without having to purchase any additional licenses. RF licenses can not be given on an exclusive basis. In

stock photography Stock photography is the supply of photographs 396x396px, ''View from the Window at Le Gras'' (1826 or 1827), by Nicéphore Niépce, the earliest known surviving photograph of a real-world scene, made with a camera obscura. Original (left) & ...

, RF is one of the common licenses sometimes contrasted with Rights Managed licenses and often employed in subscription-based or

microstock photography Microstock photography, also known as micropayment photography, is a part of the stock photography Stock photography is the supply of photographs which are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in th ...

business models.

Computer standards

Photography and illustrations

See also

References