4 ms·

It's important to allow protection for ideas/products/software/drugs that take a large amount of investment to develop. If you spent 10 years and millions devel

It's important to allow protection for ideas/products/software/drugs that take a large amount of investment to develop. If you spent 10 years and millions developing a better video compression algorithm, why there should not be a way for you to offer it to market, but at the same time have it protected against copying. Similar problem occurs in biotech, if you developed a drug and proved it helps cure a disease, usually it is trivially simple to create the same drug (generics). This means that without a patent, companies would lose part of the incentive to innovate. However, if your patent is simple, it's an idea like pinch to zoom that realistically didn't need millions in research to develop, then that patent should not be granted as the purpose of the patent is not return on investment from research.

TheAceOfHearts 7y ago
One of my big problems with file format patents is that historically they've been abused and used to place artificial restrictions on the user. There should be playback and encoding exceptions for personal non-commercial use, or at the give the user an option to export / convert their media into a standard format. Have people forgotten the terrible user experience with media file formats in the 90s and 00s? You had to download a bunch of codecs and fiddle around with different programs in order to watch a video. The details on this point are a bit fuzzy, but I also remember having to needlessly jump through hoops in order to encode some audio files for my MP3 player. Fast-forward to the current year: now I can use ffmpeg for conversions and either mpv or VLC for playback, providing a vastly superior user experience. This is only possible because the developers of these tools have opted to completely disregard software patents.
kstrauser 7y ago
Right, except for you software example, which in the case of video compression is purely math (which is discoverable, not patentable). It would be illogical to allow that patent.

TheAceOfHearts 7y ago

One of my big problems with file format patents is that historically they've been abused and used to place artificial restrictions on the user. There should be playback and encoding exceptions for personal non-commercial use, or at the give the user an option to export / convert their media into a standard format. Have people forgotten the terrible user experience with media file formats in the 90s and 00s? You had to download a bunch of codecs and fiddle around with different programs in order to watch a video. The details on this point are a bit fuzzy, but I also remember having to needlessly jump through hoops in order to encode some audio files for my MP3 player. Fast-forward to the current year: now I can use ffmpeg for conversions and either mpv or VLC for playback, providing a vastly superior user experience. This is only possible because the developers of these tools have opted to completely disregard software patents.

kstrauser 7y ago

Right, except for you software example, which in the case of video compression is purely math (which is discoverable, not patentable). It would be illogical to allow that patent.