If an American company incorporated Bellard's reference decoder into a commercial product that is distributed in binary form to clients, would that company need to license the HVEC patents to avoid being sued by an HVEC patent holder?
Almost certainly yes, you would need to license the many patents covered in H.265 and H.264.
However if you look at the history of JPEG and MP3, which were also encumbered with patents, the public domain basically won due to the sheer number of violations being too large to take down or even force licensing.
It will be interesting to see if any product (ie browser) actually puts any of these algorithms in their codebase.
Yes. Part of the idea seems to mostly be that if you have HVEC support via the OS or licensing, you get BGP support without any additional legal hassles.
