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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
by 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 agoIt'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.