&#62; Yes it is. It is owned by a consortium, and that consortium wants money off me if I write and distribute software (my own software, that I have written, for fucks sake, not their software that they have written) that implements it.<p>Proprietary means "manufactured exclusively by the owner of intellectual property rights (IPR), as with a patent or trade secret." So, no, it's not proprietary. The fact you can write your own version of the standard without reverse engineering proves that.<p>H.264 wasn't trivial to create. It involved a lot of work to both meet the quality requirements and the technical requirements for supporting all the various ways in which it can be used. MPEG-LA isn't imposing a fee for your work, they're only imposing it for the costs associated with defining the standard. You're not charged more if you write a more complex implementation of the standard.<p>That being said, I still think it's dumb to charge for the standard. But it's perfectly within their reason and we have OSS alternatives to fall back on.