We "fanatical FOSSies" are pushing towards a world where people are free to do interesting things with technology without needing permission or excessive upfront money. H.264 is not one of those technologies.

With regard to software specifically, this movement to strip an entire category of inventions of protection lacks nuance. What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents are people within the software industry itself, but usually not the real innovators. Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set? Because boy oh boy, if that's true, we're really overpaying software "engineers" then, aren't we?

What I find interesting is the biggest proponents of software patents are the patent lawyers themselves, and usually not software engineers. Well that that all interesting, because lawyers with their $10k filing fees and multimillion dollar lawsuit fees (usually by suing software companies) seem to benefit the most from their existence.

Understand, when a lawyer tells you what is good for your industry, run the other way. RUN FAST.

The "average Joe" doesn't give a dime to Oracle. It's the IT/software professionals that give millions of dollars of their departmental budgets to Oracle. The kind with an anti-Microsoft slant are even more likely to be doing this.

Ergo, Oracle should be VERY concerned of the opinion on Slashdot.

That's really not true. Blu-ray uses VC-1 also. VC-1 is the SMPTE (TV broadcast) standard, not H.264. The H.264 codec is far from being an total industry standard at this point. The real "industry standard" is MPEG-2, since all DVD movies (much popular then Bluray anyway) are all MPEG-2 movies. That's why an MPEG-2 codec costs $2.00 per unit with no upper cap, while H.264 is only 20 cents per unit, despite being a far better technology.

Yes, the vast majority of GPUs (even in embedded devices) can accelerate any kind of IDCT codec (VC-1 and Theora included).

VP-8 is a far better codec in just about every way (compression ratio, computational complexity, etc.). I just wonder what Google plans to do with it.

Thoera already has larger browser penetration then H.264:

- Firefox supports Theora, no support for H.264
- Opera supports Theora, no support for H.264
- Chrome supports Theora and H.264 (Chromium only supports Theora)
- Safari only supports H.264 by default

So the odd one out here is 3-4% marketshare Safari with it's lack of Theora.

Basically you are talking about, at best, 10% market penetration for HTML5 H.264, compared to 36% with Theora.

Firefox is taking an ethical stand by not allowing a situation like Unisys / GIFs to happen where you have to get sign contacts and pay license fees to host some video on your sites. Also Firefox would effectively be closed source if it adopted H.264, just like Chrome is. (Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on, DOES NOT support H.264).

It's worth noting none of those formats where ever pushed as an Internet standard. We still use JPEG/GIF even though there are better formats out there for over a decade. Sometimes being "industry accepted" is more important then being "the best".

What makes you think she will end up paying a dime, even if this judgement stands? The civil court system is not designed to put defendants in debt. The RIAA has a time limit to somehow collect the damages, and that is usually no more then a few years. This is why lawyers tend to sue people who have money to begin with.

Civil lawsuits are NOT designed to create indebtedness. There is a time limit to collect a civil judgment ranging from 4 to 7 years in most states. And you can declare bankruptcy before then. Basically if she doesn't have the money laying around before the verdict, it's unlikely the RIAA will get almost anything.