Can anyone answer this: what is the legal theory behind this "downstream liability" where someone who creates a video, transcodes it to something other than H.264, and then releases the video under a creative commons BY-SA license, and then someone else comes along and becomes liable for patent royalties because of a previous person in the remix chain having used H.264?
This idea might have come from the liability that can come downstream if an unlicensed (or inappropriately licensed) encoder was used to create the asset. I could see an argument for making the end distributor liable for the encoding royalty.
[1] If the file really is in another format and not just an obfuscated H.264. Judges aren't generally idiots and don't like it when you suggest they are.
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Can anyone answer this: what is the legal theory behind this "downstream liability" where someone who creates a video, transcodes it to something other than H.264, and then releases the video under a creative commons BY-SA license, and then someone else comes along and becomes liable for patent royalties because of a previous person in the remix chain having used H.264?
I don't think there is such a thing[1].
This idea might have come from the liability that can come downstream if an unlicensed (or inappropriately licensed) encoder was used to create the asset. I could see an argument for making the end distributor liable for the encoding royalty.
[1] If the file really is in another format and not just an obfuscated H.264. Judges aren't generally idiots and don't like it when you suggest they are.