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AV1 and the Video Wars of 2027
- yuhong 8y agoThe entire debt-based economy is based on extracting more dollars from "consumers". This is also part of the reason for DRM for example.
- dcgudeman 8y agoGet rid of debt! Abolish banks! No more loans! No more debt! Everyone has to save up money before they can do anything! That will fix DRM somehow!
- bopbop 8y agoIt's the As-A-Service model - the idea that software not only shouldn't be free, but also shouldn't even by run by the client. It's a pretty fundamental renegotiation of the terms of ownership. On better days I see it as a last gasp by entrenched interests to re-establish the landlordism of old now that compilers are free.
- eximius 8y agoEh, it's a good message but the dystopia is a little too over the top and reduces it's efficacy at making a statement.
- CyberDildonics 8y agoThis article is full of cliches and contains no actual technical information on AV1
- tofof 8y agoIt also contains no technical information about Disneyland or the Superbowl, despite their mentions. Technical information about any of the three would be equally (ir)relevant to the article's topic: intellectual property law. If you're really hard up for technical specs, the most cursory search might reveal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16796127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16796127 regarding https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml, or the part 2 follow-up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417586 regarding https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/av1-next-generation-video-the-constrained-directional-enhancement-filter/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/av1-next-generation-video-...
- cyphar 8y ago> intellectual property law Please stop perpetuating the use of this term. There is simply no such thing as "intellectual property" and nor are there any "intellectual property laws". The term is perpetuated by proponents of the "intellectual property lobby" which hope to confuse people over what precise laws are being changed, and what precise issues are in dispute. Not to mention that it is effectively a rewrite of history to pretend that copyright law is somehow a subset of "intellectual property law" -- the closest thing to what we would consider copyright law has existed since 1710 with the Statue of Anne in England. Laws and agreements similar to copyright (though in reality they were systems of censorship) existed even further back than that. Copyright law, patent law, and trademark law. They are separate laws, with separate rules and regulations, separate rights, and are therefore worthy of separate discussion. Not to mention that most people (understandably) have different views on these different topics -- your opinion on whether the trademark "Coca Cola" should be used by third-parties is probably different to your opinion on whether the text of Alice in Wonderland should be used by third parties, or whether the designs for penicillin should be used by third parties. The article in question has also (unfortunately) made the same mistake -- conflating patents and copyright law. I say "unfortunately" because I agree with the general point they're making -- that free software and patent-free standards are very important. But conflating the two doesn't make sense and just leads to confusion.
- tofof 8y agoThe term "intellectual property" was used in 1845 in Davoll et al. v. Brown, 173 years ago. The WIPO was created in 1967: 51 years ago. Whatever your personal objections are to a collective term for intangible human creations, claiming that "there is no such thing as intellectual property" is unhelpful to your cause, as that contention is simply absurd. It is beyond belief that a cabal of lobbyists has convinced practically every nation on earth [1] to collectively supervise a nonexistence. No, copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret/trade dress/design rights/moral rights/publicity rights/mask work rights/database rights/plant variety rights/geographical indications/etc(^) are not always detailed in separate laws. As early as 1916 the big three were grouped alike: see the Pan-American Convention's "Patents Trade Marks Copyright Status Report" and South Africa's "Patents, Designs, Trade Marks and Copyright Act" both in that year. Yes, some separation exists for some of these ideas in some jurisdictions - US law separates copyright from trademark, for example, but not from moral rights, which are directly incorporated into copyright law in Title 17 USC. And no, you can't argue that copyright and moral rights are indistinguishable: even after assigning away copyright, an author retains the moral rights (e.g. right to attribution). And of course, the US also groups trade marks and patents together under the purview of the USPTO, and collectively joins invention rights (utility patents), plant variety rights, and design rights (design patents) all under the umbrella of 'patent law'. Even where there is separation, that separation does not preclude the existence of a collective noun for the set. Nor does assignment into a collective set does imply a "rewrite of history". In fact, nearly all sets must be predated by at least one of their members; it would generally be nonsensical to create and name empty sets before any of their eventual members even exist. In any case, arguing the merit of individual discussion is nonsequitous -- the existence of a collective name in no way precludes it. Using your reasoning: "There simply is no such thing as the 'United States of America', nor are there any 'federal laws'. The term is perpetuated by proponents of the 'federal government'. It is a rewrite of history to pretend that that Virginia is somehow a subset of the USA -- the closest thing to what we would consider a state has existed since 1606 with the First Charter of Virginia in England. Native settlers of a similar area existed even further back than that.' (^) Man, that's awkward. If only there was a term to denote that set that I just needed to name. 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/WIPO_members_2012.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/WIPO_members_...
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoI'm not clear why you expected it to...?
- CharlesW 8y agoHere's my favorite exchange from the comments: > Tigt: I have no idea what you want me or others to do, even after reading this 3 times. > Judy DeMocker [Author]: That’s a valid point. I'm sure it was fun to write a post that imagines how the use of anything-other-than-AV1 ultimately leads football fans to firebomb police stations in 70 cities. But I'd rather have read a thoughtful post on actually-legitimate reasons to care about this.
- shmerl 8y ago> I have no idea what you want me or others to do, even after reading this 3 times. I think that's actually pretty clear. Keep pushing for free and open standards. Oppose lock-in and patent protection racket.
- CharlesW 8y ago> Keep pushing for free and open standards. Oppose lock-in and patent protection racket. The commenter is looking for a list of specific, actionable steps they can take to make sure AV1 "wins". Unfortunately (as the author effectively acknowledges), there really aren't any. My worry about seeing thinkpieces like this is that Mozilla hasn't been able to influence Apple through AOMedia — it's not accidental that Apple is still missing from the front page — and so is resorting to general-audience emotional appeals. I'd go so far as to say that "here's how the sky will fall" posts like this are harmful to their cause.
- shmerl 8y agoApple are just being their usual lock-in jerks. Influencing them for anything positive is only possible under heavy pressure. In this case they were pressured, because various systems with video playback are not going to play along with HEVC racket schemes. I.e. for Apple's video services to be able to reach more users, they'll be forced to support AV1. In more practical down to earth terms, what you or any other regular user can do is to ditch Apple products and avoid paying them any money. Vote with your wallet.
- danbmil99 8y ago
- shmerl 8y agoRelated: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- ferongr 8y agoShould've thought about that before implementing h264 support in Firefox, back in the days where Mozilla was still a relevant vendor in the browser market. At this point in time, such articles seem hypocritical.
- yuhong 8y agoPart of the reason why open codecs was going to win over HEVC is the multiple patent pools, which H.264 did not have. A lot more effort is being spent on open codecs than in the olden days too.
- bopbop 8y agoNot sure why the downvotes - I think it's pretty relevant to view statements in terms of previous positions taken. I'm a big supporter of Mozilla and Firefox is the only browser I use, but another point would be the promotion of the closed ecosystem of Pocket.
- reacweb 8y agoI think the downvote is a well deserved punishment for the pointless denigration of Mozzila. I use Chrome at home and was using Firefox at work untill very recently. I had to switch to Edge at work. I also use Internet Explorer (for sites of previsou century). Firefox is around the same level as Chrome on almost everything. Edge is a notch below. Denigration is a poison that hurts a lot.
- bopbop 8y agoI agree the tone of the parent comment could use a little work, but think it's a valid point - I'm not sure it can count as denigration if it's something they've actually done. In terms of "put up or shut up" I should make clear I'm not advocating Mozilla shut up, more that they put up next time something like DRM in browsers is on the table (which they ordinarily do, which is why I use their browser).
- ferongr 8y agoI never denigrated Firefox as a product. It still performs adequately for many users and the source code model is a bit more friendly to FOSS distributions compared to Chrome. I called Mozilla an irrelevant vendor due to their disconnected leadership, diminished browser marketshare and now-fractured community, that makes all such shouty blogposts seem desperate.
- digi_owl 8y agoAV1 will win if torrents adopt it...
- rootw0rm 8y agonah. scene stuff operates within it's own alternate reality. 10 bit x264, and 10/12 bit x265 are either the default for some scenes (anime) or popular in others. there's zero hardware support for them yet, so in my mind they haven't won. AV1 will win if cheap decoding chips flood the market.
- wmf 8y agoLikewise the scene adopted MKV and everybody else kept using MP4 or TS.
- navjack27 8y agoIt's a container
- LeoPanthera 8y agoContainer choices are way less important. You can convert losslessly from one to another.
- gsich 8y agoThough Matroska is the clear winner in this regard.
- refulgentis 8y agoI'm really confused. We went from everyone backing an open codec to a dystopia with no explanation of how, only what. The writing style is fun but makes it impossible to tell what parts are shared by our reality.
- teach 8y ago> makes it impossible to tell what parts are shared by our reality Actually, it's pretty straightforward. Everything before 2018 really happened in our reality. Everything afterward is dystopian speculation.
- refulgentis 8y agoYes. However, it is still difficult to discern what is verbal flourish and what is a step along the way to dystopia. By difficult, I mean impossible, and there's a large number of commenters talking past eachother about this issue.
- monochromatic 8y ago>Meanwhile MalCorp found a way to tweak the law so its patents would never expire. It proposed a special amendment, just for patent pools, that said: Any time any part of any patent changes, the entire pool is treated as a new invention under U.S. law. This is a little silly. Patent law isn’t like copyright law. The term has never changed appreciably.
- smnrchrds 8y agoI am sure it refers to drug patent evergreening, which is a real and prevalent phenomenon.
- danbmil99 8y agoFat wallet companies can and do game the system. They patent every new minor feature, creating a rolling portfolio of patents that collectively never expire. It may be true that individually, each patent is mostly bullshit -- slight re-wording of prior art. But do you feel like a lucky punk, as an individual or small outfit, going up against EvilCorp's $1200/hr cap'n of their debate team in HS lawyers, a dozen times over five years? (with non-technical judges & juries as the final arbiter of your fate)
- needle0 8y agoI've always wondered about this. Why is it that I've never heard of large corporations trying to lobby patent law into extending, much like how it happened over and over with copyright law? Had this battle already happened and I just never heard about it, or is there something in the law (or norms/culture surrounding it) that makes people never consider doing so?
- rostigerpudel 8y agoSome "life science" companies, in particular pharmaceutical, can extend the life of their patents by 5 years in some jurisdictions (at least here in Europe). This is called a Supplementary Protection Certificate [0] and is subject to certain conditions (e.g. clinical trials took a long time). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_protection_certificate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_protection_certi... EDIT: typo
- firefoxd 8y agoIn September 2015, I was one of the people celebrating the expiration of Mp3's license. I scoured the web looking for others talking about it. I brought it up on Reddit, no one seemed to care. I still don't hear it talked about often.
- tomc1985 8y ago"Oh but it's a dead format! Who would possibly want to write mp3s today?
- yuhong 8y agoEven now Wikipedia's audio pages don't link to the MP3s directly. You have to click through to Wikimedia Commons and find the transcodes at the bottom.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- verall 8y agoI remember the _weirdest_ news cycle where like >4 news sites (including The Guardian iirc) ran articles calling MP3 a "dead" format now that the patents expired. Definitely felt like a "wet streets cause rain" story.
- tialaramex 8y agoA large proportion of all "news" is placed by PR companies, essentially advertising but with maybe some light fact checking. It's cheaper than buying advert space. Fraunhofer essentially wrote these stories, complete with the plug for its newer (patented) audio formats so that's why they say MP3 is dead rather than hooray it's free.
- gsich 8y agoBecause nobody cared about the patent in the first place.
- akvadrako 8y ago
- ksec 8y agoAuthor’s Note: This post imagines a dystopian future for web video, if we continue to rely on patented codecs to transmit media files. What if one company had a perpetual monopoly on those patents? How could it limit our access to media and culture? The premise of this cautionary tale is grounded in fact. However, the future scenario is fiction, and the entities and events portrayed are not intended to represent real people, companies, or events. If this were from a personal blog of an Mozilla employees I would have been perfectly fine with it. Instead it carries the name of Mozilla, and most of the story are simply fiction. I don't know why the title is 2027, and 2027 was never mentioned again within the article. And for those who knows, 2027 is the year all AVC / H.264 patents expires. I sometimes wish we could extend H.264 and create a new codec in a way, we will have a better codec that is patents free by 2027.
- totallyashill 8y agoExcept the point where the evil monopoly buys the patents and keeps refreshing the patent pool, thus locking things like H.264 away forever.
- ksec 8y agoIf that was valid we would never had a patent free MPEG-2 and MP3 codec by now.
- choonway 8y agoIf you are interested in dystopian fiction of these sorts, I highly recommend Manna, by Marshal Brain. In any case, don't think it will be that dystopian. There is competition from elsewhere in the world, you know.
- KaiserPro 8y agoGah, Look, the digital video world exploded, 90% of it using MPEG's standards(MPEG1/2 to start with, h.264 now. HVEC/av1 is just a blip) they were all patent encumbered FFMPEG runs 60% of the digital media world. _if_ patents were to be called in, places like disney, netflix & fox would have to spend literally billions swapping out FFMPEG or licensing it. Your phone/computer pays a h264 tax, in the same way that they pay ARM/intel, qualcomm, wifi alliance, HDMI alliance et al. HVEC gives you more efficient 4k, and HDR, but for most people that just isn't important. Streaming services still use h.264, because there is not hardware/software support upstream. Now, the thing that will decide it is the speed/quality/cost tradeoff. If the hardware doesn't support a codec, it won't be used. AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed it's not going to be used for on-the-fly encoding (live or just in time delivery from mezzanine codec) for industry noise, see https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle-between-hevc-and-av1/2710.article https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle-between-h...
- foepys 8y agoI don't know where you get your sources. Netflix switched to HVEC for 4K and YouTube is using VP9 whereever possible. Those are the biggest players on the market.
- snaky 8y agoOn the US market. Which is not only market in existence, nor even biggest one. Take China for example - where neither Netflix nor YouTube are present. > Compared with the US, China still has plenty of room to grow in a country with a population of about 1.4 billion and 751 million internet users. The proportion of internet users who pay for video content has increased more than 10 times in four years, rising to 13.2 per cent in 2016, and is expected to further increase to 40 per cent in 2022, iResearch said. By comparison, Netflix’s US-based paying members represented around 28.1 per cent of total internet video users in the country as of the end of 2016. https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-are-paying-watch-movies-online-foreign-streaming-giants-are https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-a...
- p0nce 8y agoRead this if you want the other side of the story: http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/ http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut... > So don’t expect that in the future you will see the progress in video compression technology that we have seen in the past 30 years. Google has bought a whole "camp" which is badmouthing MPEG for monetary reasons. Nothing has been over-hyped as much as AV1. Who is really evil? In the end it will all be about SSIM in non-geologic time scale.
- wolfgke 8y ago> Google has bought a whole "camp" which is badmouthing MPEG for monetary reasons. Nothing has been over-hyped as much as AV1. Who is really evil? In the end it will all be about SSIM in non-geologic time scale. I will always sympathize with the side that does not enforce protection money (i.e. patent fees) upon others via violence (e.g. legal system).
- p0nce 8y agoThat "violence" has allowed to fund video research.
- ezoe 8y agoI doubt I see a day when AV1 seriously used in the wild. It's encoding is so slow to the point that the encoding speed should be measured by FPD(Frames per Day)