I have already mentioned that MPEG had to deal with the software aspects of its work from very early on. The first MPEG-1 Video Simulation Model, fully assembled at the...
After talking about one scourge of the hacker community – software licensing – it is now time to say more about another scourge – patent licensing. Instead of discussing the...
From the very beginning MPEG realised that too many companies had invested in digital media technologies for MPEG to realistically target the development of Optionunencumbered high-performance digital media standards. That...
At the beginning of December 1970, I returned home after spending 30 months in Japan as a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo. That had been both a great...
The form of communication enabled by the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet is very effective but in general leaves out a wealth of other information that is present in...
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a globally network of interconnected information elements represented in a standard form using a dialect of SGML called HyperText Markup Language (HTML), using the...
Before starting this page I must warn the reader that MPEG-7 has more elements of abstractness, compared to previous MPEG standards that may make reading it more difficult than other...
The Life in ISO page tells about my efforts in overcoming the many obstacles on the road to establishing Subcommittee 29 (SC 29), because of the “lupissimus” nature of the...
The increased dependency of many users, particularly on mobile devices, has initiated an unstoppable drive, supported by their increasing interaction and processing capability, to pack more functionalities in those devices....
Metadata are an important ingredient for any business strategy in the media field, both at the industry and individual company level. At the industry level this can be seen from the...
My sudden, although not unplanned, departure from DAVIC gave me the opportunity to realise some ideas I had been mulling over since some time. With MPEG and DAVIC I had...
Rights to anything are defined by the public authorities of a country in which the thing is located. Rights to a literary or artistic work are no different and can...
MP3 has shown that the combination of technology and user needs can create mass phenomena behaving like a hydra. For every head of the MP3 hydra that is cut by...
When radio and television broadcasting were introduced, it was reasonable to expect that physical forms of distribution would eventually disappear. Why should people pay for something when the same thing...
MP3 has shown how the expectations of rights holders concerning the use of digital content clash with those of billions of end users. In this chapter I would like to...
After the memorable achievement of the PD 1.0 specification, I tried hard to convince SDMI people that the group should work on developing interoperable specifications that included specific technologies beyond...
Part 1 of the MPEG-21 standard has the title “Vision, Technologies and Strategy“. It is not a standard but a Technical Report because it contains a description of part of...
By 2003 the MPEG-21 project that I had kicked off three years before in MPEG, as a result of my failure to convince SDMI to move to technology specification after...