MPEG Royalties

Editguy43 wrote on 8/20/2009, 8:29 AM
Hello fellow Vegas users I have a question to those who edit for a living. My wife and I have a small production company we have done part time for a while now. I recently read that whenever you produce a DVD either for Profit or to give away you have to pay fees to the Mpeg people. I am confused by their jargon as to hwo to do this and how all this works.

So can anybody who does this explain HOW this works, I want to be legal in our business and really need some help on this.

Paul B

Comments

john-beale wrote on 8/20/2009, 9:39 AM
For small-scale operations like wedding & event videographers, it's not something I hear much about. I don't know the specific legalities but I believe in practice, those MPEG-LA royalties are more commonly applied to a replication house that has a minimum run of 500 or 1000 DVDs, than mom-and-pop operations doing small-quantity DVD-R/RW duplication.
mikelinton wrote on 8/20/2009, 1:32 PM
I wouldn't worry about it - I've never heard of anyone from the production side of things having to deal with that. This might be related more to making claims about "Encoded with MPEG2" on your discs or something... like using the DolbyDigital logo, or DVD-Video logo - you have to pay royalties to do so.

This has never come up prior to today we've been having DVDs replicated and duplicated since the medium first came out, and this is the first I've heard about it.

Mike.
farss wrote on 8/20/2009, 2:12 PM
For SD DVDs the replication house pays the royalties on your behalf, it's included in their fee. They buy the licences in bulk.
With BluRay it doesn't work that way, the replication house has to pay the fee per title. That's more overhead for them which they pass onto you.

Bob.
im.away wrote on 8/20/2009, 3:55 PM
Now I'm confused. When it comes to network rendering, my understanding was that the reason one has to have individually licenced copies of Vegas on each PC was because Sony paid the Licence fee for the encoder for every copy of the software that they sell. So does that mean that you effectively pay the fee twice if the fee is applied again at the replication house?

Cheers
john-beale wrote on 8/20/2009, 4:24 PM
To the extent that I can understand this page at all http://www.mpegla.com/m2/m2-agreement.cfm the MPEG_LA (mpeg patent pool licensing administrator LLC) charges royalties both for MPEG2 encoding (eg. Vegas software, which presumably Sony Creative Software has already paid) PLUS a per-copy fee for "MPEG-2 Packaged Medium" (eg. standard-def DVD) which I don't think Sony could have paid, because they don't know how many DVDs you've been selling. Since the "packaged medium" royalty seems to be something like $0.03 per DVD, I doubt there's much financial incentive to go after small-time producers.

For all I know, MPEG-LA may actually be getting some fee per blank DVD-R/RW from media vendors? However, please note I am not a lawyer, and I might be all wrong about all of this.
John_Cline wrote on 8/20/2009, 5:19 PM
You folks might want to check out pages 6 & 7 of the Vegas v9 user manual under "Legal Notices." It basically says that if you want to use MPEG2 or AVCHD commercially, you MUST obtain a license from MPEG-LA.
john-beale wrote on 8/20/2009, 8:57 PM
I no longer do wedding & event video. However I did for a number of years and was a member of several videography organizations. I went to meetings, I got the monthly magazines, etc. As far as I know everyone delivered product on DVD, but I never heard about mpeg2 licensing or MPEG-LA from anyone I met in the industry. Take that for what that is worth.
John_Cline wrote on 8/20/2009, 9:20 PM
I've never heard of anyone doing event videography and delivering on DVD with an MPEG-LA license. You're supposed to have one, but no one does.
R0cky wrote on 8/21/2009, 8:02 AM
Related topic wrt to using the dolby digital logo. I emailed dolby and said I wanted to use it for very small quantity give aways and they emailed me back permission and even included the artwork.

Rocky