Shady? Don't the involved parties want to protect their own interests as much as they can?
The way I read the MS and Apple licenses is that they are just covering their asses, there is a greater than zero percent chance that there could be new MPEG fees that would make it unpalatable for them to continue to support it. I suspect that neither MPEG nor Apple or MS or Adobe or really anyone wants that to happen. At the same time the MPEG folks don't want to just take a one time fee and potentially leave money on the table. It's somewhat open ended, that's unsettling but how do you price that stuff? You could do it per use but everybody seems to find that unacceptable, you could charge a percentage of profits but not many companies would go for that, you could have a one time flat fee but that will usually be too large, so you kind of have periodic re-evaluation. For most users, it seems like it's simply an issue between them and their vendor, not MPEG.
Look at MP3, it is patented. Thomson has gone after companies and collected money on the patents. Nobody seems to care at all and it appears to be much more nebulous, they may or may not try to get you to pay them, it's not clear to me who is sued and why. That's shady...
The way I read the MS and Apple licenses is that they are just covering their asses, there is a greater than zero percent chance that there could be new MPEG fees that would make it unpalatable for them to continue to support it. I suspect that neither MPEG nor Apple or MS or Adobe or really anyone wants that to happen. At the same time the MPEG folks don't want to just take a one time fee and potentially leave money on the table. It's somewhat open ended, that's unsettling but how do you price that stuff? You could do it per use but everybody seems to find that unacceptable, you could charge a percentage of profits but not many companies would go for that, you could have a one time flat fee but that will usually be too large, so you kind of have periodic re-evaluation. For most users, it seems like it's simply an issue between them and their vendor, not MPEG.
Look at MP3, it is patented. Thomson has gone after companies and collected money on the patents. Nobody seems to care at all and it appears to be much more nebulous, they may or may not try to get you to pay them, it's not clear to me who is sued and why. That's shady...