I doubt that MPEG-LA has any patents on H.265 (they don't have any on H.264). They offer a bulk licensing deal for many different patent owners which is much better than licensing from each individually.

You are right that it is highly doubtful that it would be GPLv3 compatible until the patents have expired. In practice I expect it will be included in FFMPEG and available to open source users even if impure and unavailable to strict Free software purists.

I'm not sure what isn't clean about the H.264 license except for Motorola/Google's legal action that attempts to make the FRAND commitment nearly meaningless. It would be much better for everyone else if they were part of the MPEG-LA offer.

Perhaps not MPEG-LA itself, but a company owned by it's CEO, Jack Horn definitely waded into the patent trolling business a while back:

http://www.osnews.com/story/23258/MPEG-LA-owned_Patent_Troll...

Google signed the MPEG-LA license agreement which would put Motorola's patents into the MPEG-LA pool as well. Arguments are Monday, so one way or another, it will be clarified sooner or later.

Even if they lose that part they won't be signed up to H.265 licence unless they choose to so the FRAND status matters too so can potentially charge excessively. Also if the weak FRAND interpretations stand many other patent holders may stay outside the collective license to get as much as they can.

I hesitate to bring this up, because it may well trigger a barrage of ill informed replies onto the poor overtaxed internet, but…

Does GPL-3 have anything to say about third-party patents? Assuming I neither own nor control the sublicensing of any patents, why could I not write an H.265 decoder and place it under GPL-3? (Well not me specifically, but someone who lives in a country free of software patents.)

I'm not seeing the problem, except for possibly in section "11. Patents" of the GPL-3 there is this odd paragraph…

If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients. “Knowingly relying” means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient's use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.

… which seems to create some sort of obligation if I have reason to believe there exists a country in which the work would infringe a patent. But there are three remedies available, one of which is to publish the source code of the program, which is sort of a non-penalty for a GPL licensed program.

I believe this section is mostly dealing with companies that create a library, patent it, then create a GPL3 app that uses said library without the intention of opening up the library. Looking at you NVIDIA :). The way I'm reading that is if you build a work that relies on a library covered under patent you must do one of the following: 1. Publish the library as some form of open source (no license specified) 2. Cede the patent to the public domain through some mechanism 3. Grant anyone creating software based on said library a license to the patent free of charge.

As the MPEGLA owns the patent and is not shipping code #1 would not be available and #2 and #3 would not be applicable to a 3rd party developing code because they don't own the patent.

IANAL but that seems to be the way that clause was intended.

Yes, it is. And very heavily.