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I don't think that's the point. The idea of patents is to make trade secrets public for the common good. If the patents were useful, the VP8 guys would be able
by DougBTX 16y ago
I don't think that's the point. The idea of patents is to make trade secrets public for the common good. If the patents were useful, the VP8 guys would be able to produce a list of helpful patents. Since this is a call for unknown patents, including patents unknown to the VP8 implementors, patents have failed to encourage innovation in this case.
- jacobolus 16y agoThe information in patents isn’t exclusively described in those patents themselves. I imagine a lot of the ideas become known through books, papers, open implementations of patent-encumbered codecs, etc. There was a blog post several months ago that made it sound like VP8 may have lifted several ideas directly from H.264. Furthermore, how could a patent system possibly work at all if merely claiming that you hadn’t examined the patent in question was enough to avoid liability for infringing it? Proving definitively that you’d read something before making your own invention seems like it would be an impossibly high burden for patent owners.