Comment by danbmil99
9 years ago
But, there's an important distinction. In this case, Google did in fact support an open technology platform, so anyone can get their hands on it and distribute content, free of royalty and legal obligations.
They could have chosen to be much more focused on narrow self-interest, kept the technology proprietary, and played games with their competitors. I honestly believe they chose the high road because that's part of their culture.
You've got it backwards. AV1 is pushed by companies that profit from people who "distribute content." Apple and Google take a cut of sales on iTunes and Google Play, Google gets revenue from ads on Youtube, Netflix gets monthly fees, etc. The MPEG folks never tried to get money from people distributing content--the patents address, and the licenses are for, people who distribute encoders and decoders.
And I don’t agree with your point about the “high road.” Google releases lots of open R&D “for free” that’s bankrolled by its enormous advertising profits. I think you have to view their R&D efforts through that lens, because none of it would be possible without the monetization models enabled by the advertising business. Is Android, for example, a “high road” compared to Symbian, just because Android is free and open? Not in my view.
(Incidentally, it’s a lot like Xerox. Xerox PARC invented a ton of stuff that it didn’t patent and people freely used. But it was all bankrolled by their patents on copiers. When Xerox was forced to license those patents to Japanese companies, the money printing press disappeared and so did PARC.)
Your analysis accurate as far as it goes but you are kind of missing the point.
Granted, companies like Google and Xerox don't do things out of an altruistic desire to save the world. It's enlightened self-interest, and they do develop business models to make money.
The difference between their model and the more typical patent protection / royalty approach is that in the open case, anyone else can use the research to do whatever they want. Rather than being siloed within a single company, and protected through legal means, the research is free for anyone else to leverage. This results in best of class open solutions rising to the top, and avoids the problem of everyone reinventing the wheel in their own little wheelhouse.
I care less about how much money Google is making, & more about how much access I have to the research they are sponsoring.