Problematic on many levels, just one is that government has actively mandated and “become increasingly dependent on private sector standards” without adequate safeguards, see see brief at:
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20081224070437637&query=Rambus

In any event, patents expire and put technology and its description into the public arena — this is at the heart of their reason for being — whatever the many opinions about the interplay between patents, patent pools, and policy.

So this thinking parallels the OMS Video codec specification’s royalty-free methodology — start from a known royalty-free base and build up, adding only royalty-free methods.

OMS Video specification starts from the very closely related h.261 specification on which MPEG-1 was closely based, and arrives at an interestingly similar place.

To quote Wikipedia:

“In fact, all subsequent international video coding standards (MPEG-1 Part 2, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, H.263, MPEG-4 Part 2, and H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10) have been based closely on the H.261 design.”

… “[MPEG-1] is heavily based on H.261″.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.261
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1#Part_2:_Video

The OMS Video specification is described at http://www.robglidden.com/2008/12/oms-video-draft/.

For MPEG-1 in particular, my current guess is that a royalty free (RF) profile might be as simple as stating that there can’t be any B or D frames and no layer 3 audio. (This would have the side effect of making MPEG-1 RF quite a bit easier to program a decoder for.)

Rant mode on:
It seems like there is something wrong with the patent system when you have to go to so much effort just to figure out what technology is actually covered by a patent.

Examining claim constructions, prior art (and subsequent) references in a patent itself, a patent’s prosecution history, deltas between multiple country filings, and continuations and divisions can provide important insight into what technology is actually covered by a particular patent or thicket, and time frames. In other words, a patent builds on something — that something is relevant, and one might find that the “last to expire” may be the “least useful detail” rather than the “final essential building block”.