Seeing as how this was a topic some time ago I had emailed MPEGLA and they called me, at 2AM down here so I'm still half asleep and can't be bothered finding the original thread.
In general and despite the way the licence that comes with every NLE is worded we are covered even if we make money from using the encoder. Specific case I asked about was if we are paid to shoot an event or corporate video which we encode to H.264 and then sell to our customer or charge a fee for service. In this case our customer(s) are considered subscribers and you only need pay a licence fee if you have over 100,000 subscribers which as the man said is very unlikely.
Services that have subscribers that do not pay a fee also do not require a licence so Youtube and Hulu do not have a to pay a fee as they don't charge to view.
The same applies to using your AVCHD camera, you can do what you want with the video you shoot on it.
What the licence doesn't let you do is use say your camera as a direct to subscriber encoder. You also cannot take the encoder chip out of it and use it that way.
Licence fees when they are payable are very reasonable at $2 per encoder or decoder device and $0.02 per disk.
I hope this puts everyones mind at ease. It is not a legal opinion. If you want further clarification or have additional concerns contact MPEGLA. The gent who called was very keen to help even if he didn't realise he was calling the other side of the world in the wee hours of the morning.
Oh and I hear LA is expecting another two feet of snow :)
Bob.
In general and despite the way the licence that comes with every NLE is worded we are covered even if we make money from using the encoder. Specific case I asked about was if we are paid to shoot an event or corporate video which we encode to H.264 and then sell to our customer or charge a fee for service. In this case our customer(s) are considered subscribers and you only need pay a licence fee if you have over 100,000 subscribers which as the man said is very unlikely.
Services that have subscribers that do not pay a fee also do not require a licence so Youtube and Hulu do not have a to pay a fee as they don't charge to view.
The same applies to using your AVCHD camera, you can do what you want with the video you shoot on it.
What the licence doesn't let you do is use say your camera as a direct to subscriber encoder. You also cannot take the encoder chip out of it and use it that way.
Licence fees when they are payable are very reasonable at $2 per encoder or decoder device and $0.02 per disk.
I hope this puts everyones mind at ease. It is not a legal opinion. If you want further clarification or have additional concerns contact MPEGLA. The gent who called was very keen to help even if he didn't realise he was calling the other side of the world in the wee hours of the morning.
Oh and I hear LA is expecting another two feet of snow :)
Bob.