MPEG2 Rights

[cyberboy]

If I edit and author MPEG material for which I have the rights in Womble's "MPEG Video Wizard DVD," could I owe the MPEG Licensing Authority any fees for DVDs burned with just that material? Thanks.

[filmboss80]

Unless you pay up, you are subject to harsh fines and a long, long jail term.

Okay, maybe not.

Here, read this:

http://www.m4if.org/patents/

[johns0]

You dont owe anything if its your own material.You pay womble the rights to use the mpeg encoding process.If we had to pay fees for each mpeg we created it would amount to royalties in the billions for us to pay.

[AlanHK]

In theory, yes. In practice, hardly anyone does.
It's like oral sex is illegal in some states.

[guns1inger]

Buy purchasing Womble you have paid your royalty fee (actually, they paid it and recouped form you). This covers you for private use and you can encode as much and as often as you like for no extra charge.

Technically, if you were to embark on a large commercial DVD production business, you will also be liable for royalties on the DVDs you produced. The licensing for DVDs is based on content length and volume, rather than the per unit calculations used for software.

I don't know were the licensing stands for service based products, such as transferring videos to DVD etc., but I suspect it is simply not regarded as worth pursuing.

[Cornucopia]

Yeah, what guns1inger said is correct, and similarly, licensing the rights in a mass-produced DVD are subsumed in the cost of the production/replication (basically ~ few cents per dollar are going to licensing).

Scott