You must be mistaken, Sir. I was told that 9/11 was planned by Saddam Hussein, and that this justified the Iraq invasion. It is what I heard from Rumsfeld and Fox in 2003, so that had to be true. Or is it now one of those conspiracies that you are denouncing?

A federal offense ? In the UK ? That's new for me.

Multiplied by the number of users, it may be a big sum. I don't know if Germany has class-action laws though.

Well, that's true, but only in practice. But that would not answer the interrgogation of the original poster, which is the probblem of the egg and the chicken.

Well, ever thought that issue also happened for a gcc written in C? Compilers come with minimal bootstrap compilers written in assembler to initiate the first compilation. Then compilers compile themselves several times until they reach a final version.

I'll answer to myself: regarding point 2, we have the opinon of a Mozilla dev against this idea:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html

Something I do not understand with HTML 5:

1) Why is the video codec type hardcoded in HTML5? Tight coupling has been known to be bad practice in many engineering problems, especially in programming. Avoiding such pitfalls is the base of object oriented programming, isn't it ? Wouldn't it be more logical to let HTML5 use media codecs availabl from the underlying OS?

2) Even if HTML5 has to define a video codec in their specifications, why Firefox cannot instead create a plugin that would take advantage of codecs installed on the system? They would avoid distributing a H264 decoder, but at the same time would be able to use the one the user would install separately (of course with disclaimers such as do it at your own risk, etc).

Can anyone enlighten me about this, or give me links?

Nowadays, such practical joke would lead to cease and desist letters, followed by a lawsuit for $4,000,000,000 of compensation, damages and libel, and finally royalties for licensing the use of his first name in videogames, tv, cinema, songs, or any other media.

Well, that did work for MP3, didn't it ? After some time, consumers made interoperability between mp3 players prevail and vendors finally sold DRM-free mp3 music.