Microsoft has reiterated its commitment to H.264 video and questioned why Google won’t provide legal backing for its WebM format.
In a lengthy blog post, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, raises a number of legal issues surrounding WebM, the “open” video format that Google is pushing by dropping H.264 support in its Chrome web browser.
In particular, he asks why Google isn’t indemnifying organisations that deploy WebM against potential patent lawsuits.
“Offers of ‘free’ or ‘royalty-free’ source code and strong assertions that the technology is ‘not patent encumbered’ don’t help when a patent holder files a complaint that your video, your site, or your product infringes on her intellectual property. The only true arbiter of infringement, once it’s asserted, is a court of law. Asserting openness is not a legal defense,” Hachamovitch wrote.
“Will Google indemnify Mozilla, a PC OEM [manufacturer], a school, a Web site, a chip manufacturer, a device company, or an individual for using WebM? Will they indemnify Apple? Microsoft? Will they indemnify any or all of these parties worldwide? If Google were truly confident that the technology does not infringe and is not encumbered by patents whatsoever, wouldn’t this indemnification be easy?”
The reason Google won’t he says, is because it knows that WebM isn’t as free from legal risk as it publicly insists.
“Looking at the notes from a recent WebM Summit, Google says that there are ‘no known royalty requirements’. That’s quite different from no royalty requirements,” Hachamovitch adds.
Microsoft has just released a plugin that will allow Windows Chrome users to play native H.264 video; it released a similar plugin for Windows Firefox last year. On a Mac, Safari will be the only browser that supports native H.264 playback via HTML5.
