10 ms·

See also this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18207478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18207478 for what that Genomics 'standard' they are tryi

• SllX 8y ago
  Arguably MPEG isn't the problem, it's just a symptom. You will not find many people as disgusted by rent-seeking as I am, but the real target in my scope would be US Patent law here. MPEG is the rent-seeking arm of several organizations, some of which actually do excellent technical work that is arguably beneficial to society. They don't have a monopoly on doing excellent technical work, even the kind that is beneficial to society, and back when you could count on MPEG LA being the only contact you needed to license a set of patents, it wasn't the worst state of affairs in the world. Not ideal, but definitely not the worst that an army of lawyers could come up with.
• rayiner 8y ago
  > MPEG is a rent-seeking organization that doesn't actually contribute anything useful to society. It just tries to lock up technology and standards behind patents, and then extorts money for use of those standards. It’s not “extortion” to charge money for people to use technology you developed, and its a better business model for society than bankrolling that technology through advertising (which is the FB/Google alternative to R&D). MPEG-LA is not locking up technology that already existed or other people developed. Its members are the folks who originally developed this technology. It’s notable that no open-source entity developed something like h.264 first.
  • shmerl 8y ago
    Software patents protection racket is a morally bankrupt "business model". It only exists because of the broken legal system that allows such parasites to slow down progress.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      While software patents may be broken in many instances, I don’t think video codecs are one of them. It’s not like MPEG-LA is suing people for using independently-developed designs that just happen to infringe. If you’re infringing the MPEG patents it’s likely because you’re purposefully building on their work. And that’s okay in my book. I much preferred the old days when everyone just paid Sony and Panasonic for a license than the current model where “free” codecs are bankrolled by spying on everyone’s email and helping Russians fix elections.
      • shmerl 8y ago
        MPEG-LA are actively trying to impede development of open codecs, or slow them down with FUD and threats. They are acting like a classic racketeer thug. I'm surprised some are trying to whitewash their behavior. I guess glorified mafia is the way to "move things into the future" according to MPEG-LA supporters.
      • CamperBob2 8y ago
        The problem comes in when patents have the effect of walling off an entire subfield of computer science from the perspective of the commercial R&D world. Classic cases in point are IBM's patent on arithmetic encoding, which rendered that entire class of algorithms radioactive in the 1980s-1990s era, and the original Lempel-Ziv patent claims dating back to 1978. We are most certainly not better off as a society because we granted decade+ monopolies on those claims, and I see no reason to think any differently of MPEG.
      • vetinari 8y ago
        > It’s not like MPEG-LA is suing people for using independently-developed designs that just happen to infringe I think you missed the whole FUD campaign against VPx, where they tried to persuade the public that VPx does infringe patents in their pool.
    • freeone3000 8y ago
      They're not slowing down progress AT ALL - their patent is remarkably easy to understand, their reference implementation is available, and if you wanted to reimplement it, they will send you a complete spec by email! They are using patents for their intended purpose - they're making money by licensing the method of doing something they figured out how to do better than anybody else.
  • flukus 8y ago
    > It’s not “extortion” to charge money for people to use technology you developed They aren't charging for use of their technology, they're charging for use of their algorithms/patents. The extortion part comes from making it an industry standard, we should never allow proprietary protocols to become (official or de-facto) standards.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      MPEG-LA members built the algorithms, at great expense. These aren’t Amazon’s “one click shopping” patents. And what’s the alternative to bankrolling protocol development with patents? It has worked just fine for decades, including for really fundamental things like memory interfaces. What’s the alternative monetization model? The web? Where the pretense of standardization has been dropped and the “standard” is de facto driven by compatibility with a browser that is developed for the sole purpose of spying on people and peddling advertising?
      • bryanlarsen 8y ago
        The alternatives to patents are trade secrets, open source style collaboration and academic research. All 3 have been pursued quite successfully to develop compression algorithms. 20 year monopolies are not necessary.
        • rayiner 8y ago
          Open source collaboration is usually bankrolled by something else. E.g. the top two corporate contributors to the Linux kernel each contribute more than all the independent contibutors together. Sometimes the something else is benign (Redhat funds Linux development by selling support), sometimes not (Google funds Blink development through advertising).[1] Trade secrets wouldn’t work for a video codec. Which leaves academic research, which is bankrolled by taxes and tuition. Should tax dollars be used to subsidize development of consumer products primarily used for entertainment? I think the 20 year monopoly is relatively innocuous in comparison, or at least the alternatives are not obviously less problematic. [1] 802.11fb, now with opposition research acquisition at the MAC layer!
  • lysium 8y ago
    I don’t think it’s beneficial for society to have standards that are covered by patents. I agree that inventors should be compensated, but this 20y patented-standard model looks too one-sided to me.
    • cyborgx7 8y ago
      In patents, 20 years seems oppressive. But in copyright, it is something to dream of.
  • masklinn 8y ago
    > MPEG-LA is not locking up technology that already existed or other people developed. Its members are the folks who originally developed this technology. It’s notable that no open-source entity developed something like h.264 first. Note that its claims are not necessarily founded on anything e.g. MPEG-LA created a patent pool for DisplayPort, VESA claims the tech is completely royalty-free.
    • blattimwind 8y ago
      MPEG-LA is unrelated to MPEG.
      • masklinn 8y ago
        Yes? Nothing I said links MPEG-LA to MPEG, and my other comments specifically make the point that they're unrelated.
  • reacweb 8y ago
    Compression has always been a patent minefield. Even for something as simple as gzip, it was a lot of legal work. For video compression, it is much worse. I am suprise that VLC does even exist despite such a minefield.
    • userbinator 8y ago
      In some countries, software patents are not enforceable.
      • rayiner 8y ago
        And is codec development improving at a much more rapid pace there compared to the US?
    • GuB-42 8y ago
      Usually, free software get a royalty free license. In the case of HEVC, software decoders are free as long as they are not bundled with hardware. They explicitly said that they are OK with VLC. Worth noting that the patent conditions still apply. It may be a problem for some free software distribution, and as a result software like VLC isn't always available by default.
      • wolfgke 8y ago
        > Usually, free software get a royalty free license. In the case of HEVC, software decoders are free as long as they are not bundled with hardware. The problem is that "bundling with hardware" is very vague. For example, if some OEM sells their PCs/laptops with preinstalled GNU/Linux (containing VLC), does this count as bundling. Or let us consider, say, a singleboard computer that can be both used as a PC and a set-top box just by installing a different firmware (think GNU/Linux distribution) that is provided for free (as beer) at the vendor's website - what is bundling then?
        • rayiner 8y ago
          The PC is obviously a bundle.
• masklinn 8y ago
  > MPEG is a rent-seeking organization that doesn't actually contribute anything useful to society. It just tries to lock up technology and standards behind patents, and then extorts money for use of those standards. You're thinking about MPEG-LA, and even then your description is debatable. MPEG itself is a standardisation organisms (technically a joint subgroup of ISO and IEC), defining standards out of technologies both patented and not. MPEG-LA is a separate and completely unaffiliated entity which licenses patent pools: MPEG-LA does not create or hold patents itself, they get agreements from patent holders and sell "bundled" licenses for all patents essential to implement a relevant technology (or so they claim e.g. MPEG-LA created a patent pool for DisplayPort independently from VESA, which disputes this necessity and asserts the standard is completely royalty-free).
  • gsnedders 8y ago
    > MPEG itself is a standardisation organisms (technically a joint subgroup of ISO and IEC), defining standards out of technologies both patented and not. One could argue that the MPEG could take a stronger stance by requiring a RF grant from its participants like some other SDOs do.
    • masklinn 8y ago
      One could definitely argue that, but that's a far cry from "a rent-seeking organization that doesn't actually contribute anything useful to society".
  • tialaramex 8y ago
    > standardisation organisms (technically a joint subgroup of ISO and IEC Guessing you wanted "standards organisation" and technically MPEG is a Working Group of a Subcommittee of the Joint Technical Committee between ISO and IEC. Patents are sad because they create an incentive to argue for a technically inferior choice that you "own" over a superior choice that you don't own. CA/B Forum (which isn't an SDO but bear with me) ran into trouble when setting up the Ten Blessed Methods (our name, not theirs) for validating control over an FQDN because it turns out some ways to implement these methods were patented by members. Although CA/B isn't an SDO, the effect of it making rules about how things are done is to set a standard, since all significant vendors in this space are members of CA/B, and all major trust stores require you to obey CA/B rules even if you're not a member. The patents didn't cover any of the good ways to implement the Ten Blessed Methods. Literally in every case the patent described the most unsatisfactory half-arsed way to achieve something you could imagine, the existence of these patents was causing vendors to prefer to do something bad (which they'd patented) rather than something good (which they had not). But there was a reluctance to just say "OK, we patented all this stinking garbage, but forget about that" and get on with it, this stalled things for many months. After all patents aren't free, who wants to admit they bought something worthless? Ugh.
• cwyers 8y ago
  Commercial development of codecs has put a lot of resources towards codec development, the ability to be compensated for that work enables continued investment, and the ability of standards to incorporate patents means that this work that can be used in broad-based standards. All that society has gotten out of it is cheap, ubiquitous video on a lot of devices that wouldn't have it otherwise without consumers having to pay attention to what video formats they're paying for using.