Well, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder.
These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".
Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here
alt Hacker News
Well, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder.
These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".
Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here