I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court. But yes, as far as I can tell, that is what they are trying to claim.
It's interesting, because to stream H.264 video, you don't even need to necessarily have encode it. You could get video encoded by a third party (perhaps you got it that way, or perhaps you sent it to a third party to re-encode), serve it to your users, and they could play it with licensed H.264 player. The MPEG-LA seems to think that for doing that, you should have to pay them a license, despite the fact that you have never touched an H.264 encoder or decoder.
I would find it hard to believe that they could sue you for this and actually succeed, though they could probably bleed smaller players dry in the process of defending themselves.
It would be interesting to set up a video service that did this; used H.264 without ever using an encoder. You could make your users upload it encoded appropriately, or use Zencoder or AWS Encoding to transcode it for you.
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I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court. But yes, as far as I can tell, that is what they are trying to claim.
It's interesting, because to stream H.264 video, you don't even need to necessarily have encode it. You could get video encoded by a third party (perhaps you got it that way, or perhaps you sent it to a third party to re-encode), serve it to your users, and they could play it with licensed H.264 player. The MPEG-LA seems to think that for doing that, you should have to pay them a license, despite the fact that you have never touched an H.264 encoder or decoder.
I would find it hard to believe that they could sue you for this and actually succeed, though they could probably bleed smaller players dry in the process of defending themselves.
It would be interesting to set up a video service that did this; used H.264 without ever using an encoder. You could make your users upload it encoded appropriately, or use Zencoder or AWS Encoding to transcode it for you.