[meta-freescale] Freescale Media Codecs and patents

[Diego]

Hi meta-freescalers,

I know this is mostly a question for lawyers, but it is surely related to 
software, hardware and Freescale, so it might fit at least parly, also here.

I proposed a different, but partly similar, question on FSL Community regarding 
Android, but had no reply:
https://community.freescale.com/thread/337394

Freescale provides in the BSP modifications to software (e.g. gstreamer) or 
binaries to exploit hardware capabilities and for example offload video 
reproduction to the VPU.

My question is: does that mean that when video decoding is done in hardware  
patent protected algorithms (e.g. H.264) are not present in software, so I 
should not worry about paying patent licenses, because "it's the hardware that 
I've already paid for that does the decoding computing"?

I know that I should be careful that patents may cover *in theory* any piece 
of software, but not having to worry about mp3, aac, H.264 and so on would be 
a great alleviation.

Thanks for any hint or answer you might give.

Bests,
Diego

P.S.: I know software patents apply only in some contries, but our software 
should be able to ship (almost) worldwide.