What difference does it make? It even seems backwards in some sense --- that writing code based on a freely available spec means you have to pay a license fee, yet someone else can give away their implementation freely? IANAL, so perhaps what we think of as the crazy and contorted bureaucratic mess that is the patent system would make sense in some strange and twisted way to those who designed it.
You don't have to pay for writing code based on the spec, you have to pay for users using it. Just as Cisco does for users of their free binaries. (They probably don't pay all that much extra since they already pay tons of fees for their own products, and it has to be some kind of flat-rate deal since they can't track precise user numbers)
If you take their code and compile it yourself, you are on the hook for fees of users, just as if you wrote the code yourself.
I don't like it, but it is a logical option that if someone pays it is the one responsible for making the "product" (=binary including the codec)
Not really, it's just compliance with the license that a piece of software is offered with. Things are no less silly in the world of open source. You are bound to honor the license of the open source software that you use. For instance, if your app links to a GPL library, you are bound to offer your code under the GPL too. However if it links to a BSD-licensed library that does the exact same thing, you don't have to.
Of course, their IP doesn't have value because it's particularly clever, it has value because it's in a specification that people have to implement in order to inter-operate with everything else that's based on the same specification. Their patent could be on a trivial tweak to something that's unpatented with no benefit other than making them money in licensing fees, and as long as they can get their version into the standard...
As a consumer I can watch videos for free on multiple services. I can create them for free on multiple devices with free software packages. And, as someone who battled multiple inane video and audio formats since the late 80s, now's the only time in history where it's fast, easy, cheap and trivial to distribute media that just works on any device.
I'm sure somebody will try to claim "chilling effect" based on one of those "free" not being Free. But things are better than they've ever been from the point of view that matters most: getting stuff done, getting stuff published, and getting yourself heard without forcing your audience to install stuff first.
Some tiny royalty payment pre-paid by the platform doesn't destroy the experience. But forcing my mom to install some sketchy open source software with the wrong volume control UI then telling her to drag and drop my Happy Mother's Day video onto a traffic cone sure does.
What difference does it make? It even seems backwards in some sense --- that writing code based on a freely available spec means you have to pay a license fee, yet someone else can give away their implementation freely? IANAL, so perhaps what we think of as the crazy and contorted bureaucratic mess that is the patent system would make sense in some strange and twisted way to those who designed it.