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I agree with some of this, and I think most software patents are garbage and should not be legally permitted. But I'm stuck on codecs. Codecs are real, as real

I agree with some of this, and I think most software patents are garbage and should not be legally permitted. But I'm stuck on codecs. Codecs are real, as real as a bag of apples. And they're complicated, extremely specific (and necessarily formally specified), and the result of a lot of work, sometimes brilliant work. If there's any software that has a chance of convincing me of patent worthiness, it's probably codecs. Or at least the co(d) part. I'm muddled on decoding because it seems like just figuring out how to read something should be treated differently. Is the term 20 years now? That's too long for any kind of software, even codecs. I think an important principle that should influence the design of patent law is the rough likelihood of the invention being made by others, or qualitatively matched or exceeded by others, in various spans of time. (Of course you have to model this assuming certain patent laws in place, as well as no patent system at all, to really do it right.) I despise patent predators, née trolls. But MPEG-LA isn't a good example for me to work with because I think they're actual companies that do stuff – make movies, Blu-ray players, TVs, etc. Some of them invented DVD and Blu-ray probably, and evidently they invented MPEG-2, which I remember was viewed as pretty slick and technically awesome when it came out (as were DVDs – I remember VCRs and boy did they suck). But 20 years? Yeah, no, this stuff should be 10 at most. I mean, would it hurt us to have 10 year terms on codecs? Would we get lesser quality codecs? I doubt it. HEVC is pretty amazing though, and it's clearly better than VP9, so it looks like the proprietary stuff beats open source in this field (tiny sample, yes, but there are many more examples available). Daala seemed to be going nowhere. Mozilla didn't seem to be able to finish it. Now some companies have teamed up for AV1, FOSS. I guess we'll see how good it is compared to HEVC.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> HEVC is pretty amazing though, and it's clearly better than VP9, so it looks like the proprietary stuff beats open source in this field This is just a restatement of the fact that codec patents exist. When the state of the art advances because of improvements A to Z and A to W are in the public domain, the proprietary codecs are still "better" because they use A to W plus X, Y and Z which the open source codecs can't use because of the patents. The real question is whether the patented things would have been invented without the patents. But the answer is probably yes, because the industry is full of huge companies like Google and Netflix that directly benefit from improving compression regardless of whether they can sell it to anyone else.
- Solar19 9y ago
  Very good points, AnthonyMouse.
- phkahler 9y ago
  AV1 is better than HEVC, is not patented, and was invented by companies interested in conserving bandwidth out of need. So yes, things get invented without patents.
  - ksec 9y ago
    >AV1 is better than HEVC, is not patented, Being royalty free does not mean it is not patented.
    - cjalmeida 9y ago
      IIRC they did patent it to use as a threat against trolls, but promise never to enforce it against fair users.
  - Solar19 9y ago
    AV1 is better than HEVC? I've never heard this claim. Does AV1 even exist in final form yet? Is it going to use more battery than HEVC? VP9 uses much more battery than H.264. Even when both have hardware decoders, VP9 uses a bit more juice. It's the computational complexity difference. Of course HEVC probably uses more juice than h.264 as well, but VP9 is notoriously inefficient and it would suck if AV1 was less energy efficient than HEVC.
zanny 9y ago
It is in the interests of media companies to produce better codecs to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of their primary revenue stream. I mean, look at Netflix - they have a huge driven reason to invest in codec development. The fact that all these businesses have vested interest and need for the best possible codecs, they have plenty of reason to invest in making new ones for self-serving purposes. No patent revenue potential required. Look at AOM - an organization formed entirely to circumvent the patent system to produce a royalty free good codec everyone can actually use. When companies look at the patent encumbered codec of the day and reject it because of the patents you have a demonstrable show of how detrimental patents are to innovation.
seer 9y ago
OK lets say we abolish patents tomorrow, and companies do what they did before - start using trade sicrets and copyrigt law. Netflix/Google/Apple/Amazon team up to create a great new codec that can only be used as a binary blob, because its compiled obfuscated etc. - something like what the game industry uses right now to protect games. People start poking around to figure out how it works, because hackers are curious folks like that, some code gets leaked at some point, and someone starts doing codecs as open source, for fun and fame. Said companies use that os and improve on it, crating the next generation. Now iterate this a few dosen times and what I think companies would figure out its easier to just team up and outsource this kind of stuff. Or maybe we’ll see what happened in the game engine world - with only copyright protecting the code - devs would not be able to use “the exact same code” but could incorporate new techniques at will, limited only by their brilliance. And then there will be paid and OS ones, but the paid ones will have reasonable terms because of strong competition from other paid or OS codecs. In any case I think it would be an improvement to the current situation.
- clouddrover 9y ago
  > Netflix/Google/Apple/Amazon team up to create a great new codec that can only be used as a binary blob But the practical reality is that these companies are doing the exact opposite with AV1: http://aomedia.org/ http://aomedia.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 The Alliance for Open Media was formed because royalty-free audio and video formats save everyone time and money, particularly in the context of the complicated licensing terms for HEVC. Netflix, Google, Apple, and Amazon all do business on the web and the W3C's royalty-free patent policy benefits everyone: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20170801/ https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20170801/
  - laumars 9y ago
    It's worth mentioning that when MPEG-LA was born, the way multimedia was moved around was quite different to how it is today. Back then it was generally transferred via physical mediums so the cost of both the codec royalties as well as the storage medium could easily be passed onto the customers ("customers" in this context doesn't necessarily mean end users). Whereas these days it's more commonly provided as a service with a fee and where the supplier has to pay for the bandwidth used. This means they have an added incentive now to improve codecs in a way that wasn't there 20 years ago because by improving codecs they can now reduce their costs while charging the same amount to their customers.
clouddrover 9y ago
> Now some companies have teamed up for AV1, FOSS. I guess we'll see how good it is compared to HEVC. Here are some comparisons between AV1, VP9, HEVC, and H.264: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/AV1-Beats-VP9-and-HEVC-on-Quality-if-Youve-Got-Time-says-Moscow-State-122945.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New... Whether or not VP9 beats HEVC, its advantages are that it beats H.264, can be used without the licensing headaches of HEVC (or H.264), and has double the decoder base of HEVC: https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp9-and-av1 https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp... You can use VP9 and Opus for video today with a view to using AV1 and Opus in the future.
- Solar19 9y ago
  That second link is remarkably hard to read. I hate this hipster web design trend of using faint text that barely contrasts with the background. That's so the opposite of what a reading experience should be. Anyway, on VP9... its disadvantage is that it's very computationally taxing compared to H.264 (and presumably VP8). MS Edge won't use VP9 on laptops that don't have hardware decoding for it, because decoding VP9 with software kills battery life. Are other browsers following similar policies on laptops? (this is only applies when the laptop is running on battery, and Edge will let you force VP9 even on battery in its flags). H.264 is quite elegant and efficient from a computational perspective. Note that even when laptops have and use hardware decoding for VP9, they still use more battery than hardware decoding H.264 (which will be in any computer that has hardware for VP9). Though there must be a threshold where a difference in bitrate would equalize them. I guess the days of H.264 computational efficiency are over if we want better compression. I'll read your links to see what to expect from AV1.
mastax 9y ago
> I despise patent predators, née trolls. But MPEG-LA isn't a good example for me to work with because I think they're actual companies that do stuff – make movies, Blu-ray players, TVs, etc. Some of them invented DVD and Blu-ray probably, and evidently they invented MPEG-2, which I remember was viewed as pretty slick and technically awesome when it came out (as were DVDs – I remember VCRs and boy did they suck). To a certain extent, I agree. If license fees for MPEG codecs have kept codec researchers in jobs, then that's a good thing. But take a look at the MPEG-LA HEVC patent list [1], keeping in mind that includes but a small portion of the HEVC-related patents. From what little I know about codec development, I expect that HEVC's advantage over AVC is from a few large changes and many small changes. However, it's difficult for me to believe that there are literally thousands of substantial patentable improvements over the state of the art in HEVC. How many of those companies are paying for cutting-edge research and how many just got a patent that mentioned coding so they could get a part of the royalties? I have neither the time nor the expertise to go through that list and tell you which are "worthy" and which are "trollish", but its farcical to suggest that all of them are so valuable that the owners deserve to rent-seek the entire video industry. 1: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/PatentList.as...

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> HEVC is pretty amazing though, and it's clearly better than VP9, so it looks like the proprietary stuff beats open source in this field This is just a restatement of the fact that codec patents exist. When the state of the art advances because of improvements A to Z and A to W are in the public domain, the proprietary codecs are still "better" because they use A to W plus X, Y and Z which the open source codecs can't use because of the patents. The real question is whether the patented things would have been invented without the patents. But the answer is probably yes, because the industry is full of huge companies like Google and Netflix that directly benefit from improving compression regardless of whether they can sell it to anyone else.

Solar19 9y ago
Very good points, AnthonyMouse.
phkahler 9y ago
AV1 is better than HEVC, is not patented, and was invented by companies interested in conserving bandwidth out of need. So yes, things get invented without patents.
- ksec 9y ago
  >AV1 is better than HEVC, is not patented, Being royalty free does not mean it is not patented.
  - cjalmeida 9y ago
    IIRC they did patent it to use as a threat against trolls, but promise never to enforce it against fair users.
- Solar19 9y ago
  AV1 is better than HEVC? I've never heard this claim. Does AV1 even exist in final form yet? Is it going to use more battery than HEVC? VP9 uses much more battery than H.264. Even when both have hardware decoders, VP9 uses a bit more juice. It's the computational complexity difference. Of course HEVC probably uses more juice than h.264 as well, but VP9 is notoriously inefficient and it would suck if AV1 was less energy efficient than HEVC.

zanny 9y ago

It is in the interests of media companies to produce better codecs to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of their primary revenue stream. I mean, look at Netflix - they have a huge driven reason to invest in codec development. The fact that all these businesses have vested interest and need for the best possible codecs, they have plenty of reason to invest in making new ones for self-serving purposes. No patent revenue potential required. Look at AOM - an organization formed entirely to circumvent the patent system to produce a royalty free good codec everyone can actually use. When companies look at the patent encumbered codec of the day and reject it because of the patents you have a demonstrable show of how detrimental patents are to innovation.

seer 9y ago

OK lets say we abolish patents tomorrow, and companies do what they did before - start using trade sicrets and copyrigt law. Netflix/Google/Apple/Amazon team up to create a great new codec that can only be used as a binary blob, because its compiled obfuscated etc. - something like what the game industry uses right now to protect games. People start poking around to figure out how it works, because hackers are curious folks like that, some code gets leaked at some point, and someone starts doing codecs as open source, for fun and fame. Said companies use that os and improve on it, crating the next generation. Now iterate this a few dosen times and what I think companies would figure out its easier to just team up and outsource this kind of stuff. Or maybe we’ll see what happened in the game engine world - with only copyright protecting the code - devs would not be able to use “the exact same code” but could incorporate new techniques at will, limited only by their brilliance. And then there will be paid and OS ones, but the paid ones will have reasonable terms because of strong competition from other paid or OS codecs. In any case I think it would be an improvement to the current situation.

clouddrover 9y ago
> Netflix/Google/Apple/Amazon team up to create a great new codec that can only be used as a binary blob But the practical reality is that these companies are doing the exact opposite with AV1: http://aomedia.org/ http://aomedia.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 The Alliance for Open Media was formed because royalty-free audio and video formats save everyone time and money, particularly in the context of the complicated licensing terms for HEVC. Netflix, Google, Apple, and Amazon all do business on the web and the W3C's royalty-free patent policy benefits everyone: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20170801/ https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20170801/
- laumars 9y ago
  It's worth mentioning that when MPEG-LA was born, the way multimedia was moved around was quite different to how it is today. Back then it was generally transferred via physical mediums so the cost of both the codec royalties as well as the storage medium could easily be passed onto the customers ("customers" in this context doesn't necessarily mean end users). Whereas these days it's more commonly provided as a service with a fee and where the supplier has to pay for the bandwidth used. This means they have an added incentive now to improve codecs in a way that wasn't there 20 years ago because by improving codecs they can now reduce their costs while charging the same amount to their customers.

clouddrover 9y ago

> Now some companies have teamed up for AV1, FOSS. I guess we'll see how good it is compared to HEVC. Here are some comparisons between AV1, VP9, HEVC, and H.264: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/AV1-Beats-VP9-and-HEVC-on-Quality-if-Youve-Got-Time-says-Moscow-State-122945.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New... Whether or not VP9 beats HEVC, its advantages are that it beats H.264, can be used without the licensing headaches of HEVC (or H.264), and has double the decoder base of HEVC: https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp9-and-av1 https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp... You can use VP9 and Opus for video today with a view to using AV1 and Opus in the future.

Solar19 9y ago
That second link is remarkably hard to read. I hate this hipster web design trend of using faint text that barely contrasts with the background. That's so the opposite of what a reading experience should be. Anyway, on VP9... its disadvantage is that it's very computationally taxing compared to H.264 (and presumably VP8). MS Edge won't use VP9 on laptops that don't have hardware decoding for it, because decoding VP9 with software kills battery life. Are other browsers following similar policies on laptops? (this is only applies when the laptop is running on battery, and Edge will let you force VP9 even on battery in its flags). H.264 is quite elegant and efficient from a computational perspective. Note that even when laptops have and use hardware decoding for VP9, they still use more battery than hardware decoding H.264 (which will be in any computer that has hardware for VP9). Though there must be a threshold where a difference in bitrate would equalize them. I guess the days of H.264 computational efficiency are over if we want better compression. I'll read your links to see what to expect from AV1.

mastax 9y ago

> I despise patent predators, née trolls. But MPEG-LA isn't a good example for me to work with because I think they're actual companies that do stuff – make movies, Blu-ray players, TVs, etc. Some of them invented DVD and Blu-ray probably, and evidently they invented MPEG-2, which I remember was viewed as pretty slick and technically awesome when it came out (as were DVDs – I remember VCRs and boy did they suck). To a certain extent, I agree. If license fees for MPEG codecs have kept codec researchers in jobs, then that's a good thing. But take a look at the MPEG-LA HEVC patent list [1], keeping in mind that includes but a small portion of the HEVC-related patents. From what little I know about codec development, I expect that HEVC's advantage over AVC is from a few large changes and many small changes. However, it's difficult for me to believe that there are literally thousands of substantial patentable improvements over the state of the art in HEVC. How many of those companies are paying for cutting-edge research and how many just got a patent that mentioned coding so they could get a part of the royalties? I have neither the time nor the expertise to go through that list and tell you which are "worthy" and which are "trollish", but its farcical to suggest that all of them are so valuable that the owners deserve to rent-seek the entire video industry. 1: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/PatentList.as...