On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 3:56 PM Leigh Scott <leigh123linux@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/30/18 5:20 AM, Leigh Scott wrote:
>
> Thanks Leigh. I see those have already made progress in code review. +1000
>
> Is there a definitive reason why those are necessary to go in RPM fusion? Was
> Tom Hughes right?
>
> Dusty

This sums up the situation

http://gnome-apps.13852.n7.nabble.com/High-Efficiency-Image-File-Format-HEIF-HEIC-support-td70229.html

IANAL, and I know basically nothing about codec patents, but it might be worth noting that there are a whole bunch of video coding techniques that are presumably completely unnecessary for decoding video *stills*, i.e. I-frames. Things like motion compensation are irrelevant if there's no motion.

So it's at least slightly plausible that any patents in question wouldn't apply to a heavily stripped down decoder that only implemented the parts of the spec needed to decode HEIF.