OT:H.264 legal license info

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Scott Sheriff] “If the courts allow a state to do this, and force Amazon to cough up the customer records, it will open the door for others to try for retroactive judgments knowing they could use the court to obtain customer records to collect the judgment if they win.”

It’s not really comparable. First, many states (and nations) have long reserved the right to collect sales or VAT taxes on catalog sales from out of state. The issue here has been on who is responsible for collecting & paying.

More to the point, catalog merchants keep detailed records of every transaction, including names, addresses & billing & payment info.

YouTube & Vimeo don’t ask me my name or location or billing info when I click on a video. I suspect that the only information needed is an IP address, & I have no idea if that information is even kept for very long.

And what if I was watching a video at an internet cafe? Or at the public library? Someone else’s computer? On a dialup or other non-static IP address? There’s simply not enough information to trace back to me reliably.

And how would you bill royalties or licensing fees for the thousands of hours of reality programming and hundreds of low budget films already completed with HDV cameras? By the amount of footage shot? Used in the final product? How does MPEG-LA find out what show was shot using their patents? Do they subpoena every production company in the US?

It’s a lawyer’s wet dream, but a plaintiff’s nightmare.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/