I was responding to the line "if 3 years from now MPEG LA decides to start charging content providers a licensing fee for their content, even if that content is distributed for free."

Aren't encoding and distribution fees both licensing fees faced by content providers? Your overall argument here isn't very strong.

If you are distributing free content, they have pledged not to charge you. It isn't so much an argument as a statement of fact.

They don't charge for the distribution but don't you have to create content to be a content provider?

Which is paid for by the folks making the software tools unless the OS paid the fee for the codec in which case you're good. The camera manufacture either paid the fee or shoots a format that can be converted on the PC.