Summary from Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_is_currently_trying_to_patent_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comme

Summary from Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_is_currently_trying_to_patent_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_...): Asymmetric Numeral Systems ([1]) is entropy coding family currently replacing Huffman and arithmetic coding in data compressors, among others, of Apple, Facebook and Google, thanks to being up to 30x faster [2]. Its author has made it public to prevent pathology of arithmetic coding, which wide use was blocked by patents for many decades ([3], [4]). However, currently others are trying to patent basic applications of ANS – including Google for AV1 video compressor (initially suggested by ANS author, who has helped them for the last 3 years: [5]) in very general patent application, to prevent others from using it in image and video compression – claims and sources: [6] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems [2] benchmarks: https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/entropy-coder https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/entropy-coder [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents [4] Charles Bloom comment: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-21-15-software-patents-are-fucking.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-21-15-software-pa... [5] https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/codec-devel/idezdUoV1yY https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/co... [6] Google claims and sources: https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Storeleap/page3 https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor... Clarification: the "30x speedup" is for decoding of the fastest arithmetic coding (~50 MB/s) vs of ANS (~1500 MB/s) in benchmark [2] for similar compression ratio (better than Huffman, which standard implementation: zlibh from gzip has ~300MB/s). The inventor of ANS is Jarek Duda.