MPEG LA is an American company based in

Denver Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the ...

that licenses

patent pool In patent law, a patent pool is a consortium of at least two companies agreeing to cross-license patents relating to a particular technology. The creation of a patent pool can save patentees and licensees time and money, and, in case of blocking ...

s covering

essential patent An essential patent or standard-essential patent (SEP) is a patent that claims an invention that must be used to comply with a technical standard. Standards organizations, therefore, often require members disclose and grant licenses to their paten ...

s required for use of the

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related t ...

IEEE 1394 IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony an ...

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile ...

ATSC Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards are an American set of standards for digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable and satellite networks. It is largely a replacement for the analog NTSC standard and, like th ...

, MVC, MPEG-2 Systems, AVC/H.264 and HEVC standards.

History

MPEG LA started operations in July 1997 immediately after receiving a

Department of Justice A justice ministry, ministry of justice, or department of justice is a ministry or other government agency in charge of the administration of justice. The ministry or department is often headed by a minister of justice (minister for justice in a ...

Business Review Letter. During formation of the

standard, a working group of companies that participated in the formation of the

standard recognized that the biggest challenge to adoption was efficient access to essential patents owned by many patent owners. That ultimately led to a group of various

patent owners to form MPEG LA, which in turn created the first modern-day

as a solution. The majority of patents underlying MPEG-2 technology were owned by three companies:

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

(311 patents), Thomson (198 patents) and

Mitsubishi Electric , established on 15 January 1921, is a Japanese multinational electronics and electrical equipment manufacturing company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is one of the core companies of Mitsubishi. The products from MELCO include elevators an ...

(119 patents). In June 2012, MPEG LA announced a call for patents essential to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. In September 2012, MPEG LA launched Librassay, which makes diagnostic patent rights from some of the world's leading research institutions available to everyone through a single license. Organizations which have included patents in Librassay include

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...

; Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center;

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the lat ...

(NIH);

Partners HealthCare Mass General Brigham (MGB) is a Boston-based non-profit hospital and physician network that includes Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), two of the nation's most prestigious teaching institutions. It was f ...

; The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University; The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania; The University of California, San Francisco; and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). On September 29, 2014, the MPEG LA announced their HEVC license which covers the patents from 23 companies. The license is US$0.20 per HEVC product after the first 100,000 units each year with an annual cap. The license has been expanded to include the profiles in version 2 of the HEVC standard. On March 5, 2015, the MPEG LA announced their

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). It is primarily used to connect a video source to a display device su ...

license which is US$0.20 per DisplayPort product.

Criticism

MPEG LA has claimed that

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, '' codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an ...

s such as

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container ...

and VP8 infringe on patents owned by its licensors, without disclosing the affected patent or patents. They then called out for “any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec”. In April 2013, Google and MPEG LA announced an agreement covering the VP8 video format. In May 2010, Nero AG filed an antitrust suit against MPEG LA, claiming it "unlawfully extended its patent pools by adding non-essential patents to the MPEG-2 patent pool" and has been inconsistent in charging royalty fees. The

United States District Court for the Central District of California The United States District Court for the Central District of California (in case citations, C.D. Cal.; commonly referred to as the CDCA or CACD) is a Federal trial court that serves over 19 million people in Southern and Central California, ...

dismissed the suit with

prejudice Prejudice can be an affective feeling towards a person based on their perceived group membership. The word is often used to refer to a preconceived (usually unfavourable) evaluation or classification of another person based on that person's per ...

on November 29, 2010. David Balto, who is a former policy director at the

Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction o ...

, has used the MPEG-2 patent pool as an example of why patent pools need more scrutiny so that they do not suppress innovation. The MPEG-2 patent pool began with 100 patents in 1997 and since then additional patents were added. The MPEG-2 license agreement states that if possible the license fee will not increase when new patents are added. The MPEG-2 license agreement stated that MPEG-2 royalties must be paid when there is one or more active patents in either the country of manufacture or the country of sale. The original MPEG-2 license rate was US$4 for a decoding license, US$4 for an encoding license and US$6.00 for encode-decode consumer product. A criticism of the MPEG-2 patent pool is that even though the number of patents decreased from 1,048 to 416 by June 2013 the license fee did not decrease with the expiration rate of MPEG-2 patents. For products from January 1, 2002, through December 31, 2009 royalties were US$2.50 for a decoding license, US$2.50 for an encoding license and US$2.50 for encode-decode consumer product license. Since January 1, 2010, MPEG-2 patent pool royalties were US$2.00 for a decoding license, US$2.00 for an encoding license and US$2.00 for encode-decode consumer product.

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC licensors

The following organizations hold one or more patents in MPEG LA's H.264/AVC patent pool.

HEVC licensors

The following organizations hold one or more patents in the HEVC patent pool.

VC-1 licensors

The following organizations hold one or more patents in the

patent pool ().

References

{{Reflist, 30em

External links

MPEG LA corporate website

New MPEG LA MPEG-2 License Agreement Offers Extended Coverage at Reduced Royalty Rates (Press Release on businesswire.com)
Companies based in Denver MPEG Patent pools Open standards covered by patents