buying vc1/mpeg licenses to use hardware decoding on raspberry pi's pre-4 was annoying https://codecs.raspberrypi.org/license-keys/

is this because of licensing/copyright?

Right, now I remember these keys.

But the very first Pi already had hardware h264 decoder (and even encoder!) which didn’t need any extra keys to work. No idea how they did it, maybe the license was included in the $25 price. Pi 1 was launched in 2013, at that time h264 has been already widespread, while mpeg-2 use was declining.

I think that’s why they did not include the license. It increases price for all users but only useful for very few of them, who connected a USB DVD or BluRay drives to their Pi-s.