shadowdaoandClaude Sonnet 5
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Cisco's own OpenH264 FAQ (openh264.org/faq.html) is explicit: they cover MPEG-LA/AVC patent-pool royalties only for their own prebuilt binary, downloaded at install time. Anyone who compiles OpenH264 from source and redistributes it inside their own binary takes on "all applicable license fees" themselves -- Cisco "will not be liable for any licensing fees incurred by other parties" in that case. LiveKit's client-sdk-cpp links Google libwebrtc via the webrtc-sdk org's fork, whose documented build args (rtc_use_h264=true, ffmpeg_branding="Chrome") are the standard Chromium/WebRTC recipe -- which links a from-source, statically-compiled copy of OpenH264 (from Google's mirror, not Cisco's runtime binary) into libwebrtc. That is exactly the shape of case Cisco's FAQ says voids their coverage. Not independently confirmed against LiveKit's actual pinned v1.10.1 build (their release archives ship only compiled output, no build manifest) -- this is webrtc-sdk/libwebrtc's documented default, not a verified fact about this specific artifact. This sharpens C1 into a concrete mechanism instead of a general open question. It does not resolve C1 -- if anything it strengthens the case for treating it as unresolved -- and none of this is a substitute for an actual legal opinion. Recorded in third_party/livekit/README.md (the full writeup), README.md's Status section, and the release-notes template in publish-release.sh so it reaches whoever opens a draft release next, not just this one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RL8abRmgFXkVASHkkqiJbE