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Naively hoped I'd read 'this will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar. Instead found the words 'patent' and 'transparent licensing mod

Naively hoped I'd read 'this will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar. Instead found the words 'patent' and 'transparent licensing model'. I appreciate that it costs money and time to develop these algorithms, but when you're backed by multi-billion dollar "partners from industry including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony" perhaps they could swallow the costs? It is 2020 after all.

yewenjie 6y ago
Is H.265 released under a GPL-like licenses? If not, how do softwares like Handbrake use it?
- speedgoose 6y ago
  They use ffmpeg, which is developed by people who do not care about software patents because it doesn't apply to them.
  - pault 6y ago
    Why don't the patents apply to them?
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      I don't know for all contributors, but the creator is French and there is no software patents in France.
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        All of the French patents listed in this license pool care to disagree: https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf
        speedgoose 6y ago
        They are not valid in France.
        AnotherGoodName 6y ago
        Patents are almost always approved fwiw and the FR cases here seem to be linked to worldwide patents. It is not the patent offices job to test the validity of patents. That occurs in a court when someone challenges the patent. This is true of every country, France included. So whilst you have a list of software patents filed worldwide (including France) that's not really relevant to the enforceability of the patent in France. This is also why you see articles from time to time highlight a stupid patent as if it's an outrage that the patent office allowed it. It's not the patent offices job to enforce patents. You can literally go ahead and patent swinging on a swing (1) and the patent office would approve it if the paper work is in order. The media would then likely pick up on this with outrage as if that's an enforceable patent. The truth is that it's simply not the patent offices job. Patents are meant to be enforced by courts. 1: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en
        jcranmer 6y ago
        > It is not the patent offices job to test the validity of patents. Actually, it is (at least in the US). USPTO can deny patents on the basis on nonpatentability, and its general refusal to do so post-State St. decision is often cited as one of the problems of the modern patent system. Broadly speaking, however, if the argument is that software patents are invalid in Europe because they'll be found so by the courts, it should be noted that SCOTUS is actually pretty likely to rule software unpatentable were it to hear a software patent case. A little background is in order: In Parker v Flook (1978), SCOTUS said that mathematical algorithms (i.e., basically software) is unpatentable. In Diamond v Diehr (1981), they said that part of the patent being software doesn't make the entire thing invalid. The big decision is State St (1998), which is a CAFC decision holding that anything was patentable so long as it produced a "useful, concrete, tangible" result and basically broke the patent office. When SCOTUS decided Bilski v Kappos (2008), they emphatically (and unanimously!) called out State St as wrong, but declined to endorse any guidelines as to what the limits of patentability should be. Later Mayo (2012) and Alice (2014) decisions again unanimously and unambiguously laid out what wasn't patentable: natural processes, and "do it on a computer" steps. A few years ago, we had a patent attorney at work tell us (paraphrasing somewhat) that Alice made it really hard to figure out how to write a software patent that wouldn't be invalidated. Their continued existence (and pretense to their enforceability) is less because it's secure and more because no one wants to spend the money to litigate it to the highest level (see also the Google v Oracle case, which is exactly the sort of thing a software patent case history would entail).
    - throwaway8941 6y ago
      Because the developers of x265 (which is the real codec and ffmpeg is a wrapper around it) are located in France. http://www.videolan.org/developers/x265.html http://www.videolan.org/developers/x265.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoLAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoLAN
- asjw 6y ago
  x265 ffmpeg
p_l 6y ago
The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered, which in turn makes it so that even if they wanted to be open, they go for defensive patents, which in turn perpetuate the situation. At least the patent licenses usually used with MPEG mean that private use of open source implementations is free.
- 1_player 6y ago
  > The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered Why is that?
  - mekster 6y ago
    It would be hard to build a new algorithm without stepping on other established algorithms that are patented.
  - p_l 6y ago
    Pretty much every method involved in high-efficiency video compression has a patent on it, doesn't matter how small part is involved. Now compound this by the fact that a) trying to make an exhaustive patent search to get a verifiable claim that you don't infringe on any patent is very problematic b) known patent pools like MPEG-LA are known not to cover everything. So you can make a reasonable bet that you avoid infringing patents by avoiding patents from MPEG-LA and few other better known groups, but you can't actually guarantee that you're not infringing on any patents. This resolves, sort of, into a game of chicken and depends heavily on whether a lesser known patent holder decides it's worth it to bother executing against you... but even if they don't, unless they come out with a royalty-free license, the possibility of patent is a Damocles' Sword hanging over your codec.
    - jariel 6y ago
      "make an exhaustive patent search to get a verifiable claim that you don't infringe on any patent" Is there even such a thing? Isn't the problem that one has to actually go to court to get the answer to this question?
CJefferson 6y ago
GPL would seem like a very weird choice -- that would mean it couldn't be put into any closed source product?
- jacobush 6y ago
  It could still serve as a reference implementation.
  - tankenmate 6y ago
    Not only a GPL reference implementation, GPLv3 would preclude patents on any improvements.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      I don’t see how that follows?
      - tankenmate 6y ago
        GPLv3 has a clause that says if you release anything under the license then you have to provide a cost free license to anything that is patented, if you aren't able to provide a license then you aren't allowed to release it under GPLv3. Any modifications to a GPLv3 licensed product has to be released under GPLv3. So yes you are correct, but in effect it might as well be patent free as far as a 3rd party end user is concerned as they have been provided what is in effect a safe harbour.
        jacobush 6y ago
        It could still be useful if the patents were part of a defence patent portfolio. (Ideally I'd abolish software patents altogether, or set a hard 10 year limit on them together with some kind of mechanism to curb the impact of add-on and submarine patents.)
        6y ago
vbezhenar 6y ago
Patents and open\close source are independent things. OpenH264 is BSD-licensed H.264 implementation, for example.
mtgx 6y ago
What you're looking for is the AV1 codec, which finalized a year and a half ago and will likely see much wider adoption, simply because none of the members want to pay royalties. https://aomedia.org/av1/ https://aomedia.org/av1/ https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ AV1 decoding has already been in Chrome and Firefox since at least a year ago. We're just waiting for hardware decoding and encoding support now, which should start appearing this year. The next version of Chrome will also support the AV1-based AVIF image format this month: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/2276542 https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/22... YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon/Twitch are also likely to not support VVC (and some of them don't support h.265 either) for their streaming services.
- pault 6y ago
  Your comment was deaded. I vouched for it because I don't see anything that looks obviously inflammatory/incorrect, but I noticed that a large fraction of your comment history is also dead. You might want to look into that, since most of the dead comments also looked fine to me.
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  >The next version of Chrome will also support the AV1-based AVIF image format this month: FWIW, Firefox supports it already (behind the image.avif.enabled knob).
geodel 6y ago
> perhaps they could swallow the costs? It is 2020 after all. They should swallow so people again come back and say they are doing it to kill competition? Just received bill from doctor's visit for hundreds of dollar, I guess things are not gonna be free in 2020 after all.
- Cu3PO42 6y ago
  Ironically in Germany, where Fraunhofer is located, you would have received no such bill.
lowwave 6y ago
MIT, FreeBSD will also do.
balls187 6y ago
That's Fraunhofer for you. In the early days of MP3, all MP3 rippers and players were built off of their implementation. Hardware and software companies had to license in order to play MP3 files. As such there was not native support for MP3's for quite some time. In the late 90's right around the explosion of MP3's on the internet, Fraunhofer was going after companies for doing so. In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years.
- grishka 6y ago
  > In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years. Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer. The initial idea behind patent system was sensible, but the way it's abused now... I mean, it could work in today's world as intended if patents lasted a year or two, not what is effectively eternity.
  - trentnix 6y ago
    Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer There are plenty of societies that don't respect intellectual property and copyright. And those societies don't innovate at the rate as those who do. There are certainly abuses in the copyright, trademark, and patent systems. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not the answer. Identifying the abuses and improving the system is the answer. Perhaps that progress won't happen at the rate you'd prefer, but it's significantly better than burning the whole thing to the ground.
    - balls187 6y ago
      > Perhaps that progress won't happen at the rate you'd prefer, but it's significantly better than burning the whole thing to the ground. Changing patent length (pc's suggestion) is hardly seems like burning the whole thing to the ground. In the US, if I understand correctly, there are ways to defend against patent abuse, though it typically involves costly legal fees. Fees many cannot justify in spending. Addressing patent challenges may be a way to protect innovators, both those who should gain reward for their innovations, and those who seek to grain reward by building upon innovations.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Notice that the missing party here was 'Google'. These are the folks who are really competing with VP9, the royalty free codec that limited the uptake of H.265.
derefr 6y ago
Of course, they can't do that, because the source technologies they've put together are themselves patent-encumbered. An AV-codec is a lot like a modern pop song: a piece of IP entirely made up of licensed samples of other people's IP. I think a more subtle "open-sourcing" of this IP could still be possible, though. Maybe one that still requires that large corporate players that are going to sell their derivative products, acquire a license the traditional way (this is, after all, what the contributors to the codec's patent-pool and R&D efforts based their relative-R&D-labor-contribution negotiations around: that each contributor would end up paying for the devices of theirs that run the codec.) Maybe there could be a foundation created under the stewardship of the patent-pool itself, which nominally pays the same per-seat/per-device licensing costs as every other member, but where this money doesn't come from revenue but rather is donated by those other members; and where this foundation then grants open-source projects an automatic but non-transferrable license to use the technology. So, for example, a directly open-source project (e.g. ffmpeg) would be granted an automatic license (for its direct individual users); but that license wouldn't transfer to software that embeds it. Instead, other open-source software (e.g. Handbrake, youtube-dl, etc.) that embeds ffmpeg would acquire its own automatic license (and thus be its own line-item under the foundation); while closed-source software that embeds ffmpeg would be stuck needing a commercial license. Is there already a scheme that works like this?
Cu3PO42 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at a Fraunhofer institute, though not Fraunhofer HHI, which developed this codec, and I have no intimate knowledge on the financing of that institute or this project in particular. But some basic principles apply to all institutes the same. Fraunhofer gets roughly 30% of its funding from public sources, the remainder is raised on a per-project basis. It's a fair assumption that those industry partners provided some funds towards the development here. Maybe they even covered all the payroll costs for the involved scientists for the duration of the project. And yet more income means more money for other research projects. Maybe ones that are not as commercially interesting, or for which a partner decides to terminate a contract rather unexpectedly. While I am also a fan of OSS and would love for work like this to either have no patents or a liberal patent grant, I can also appreciate the desire to fund your research institute.
- epanchin 6y ago
  Public sources as in the taxpayer? Why would the taxpayer fund anything that isn’t open and free. Crazy.
  - Cu3PO42 6y ago
    Yes, public sources as in the tax payer. It is worth pointing out that Fraunhofer is itself a non-profit organization. The argument that anything funded by tax money must be open is a very fair stance. Though the line gets very blurry when you mix various sources of funding like this. To the best of my recollection I have yet to be paid from any public funding (rather than project specific funding raised from the industry, for example). Personally, I have no qualms with the funding model, but other points of view are presumably equally valid.
    - osrec 6y ago
      Unfortunately, non-profit does not necessarily mean that someone in the organisation isn't amply lining their pockets.
      - 6y ago
jariel 6y ago
Yes, but what does " backed by " mean? Does it mean money, or not? Because if not, then Fraunhofer does not exist. But there is absolutely a problem here, because said 'mega businesses' actually should have a strategic imperative to want to make internet technologies more widespread. Why on earth would MS want to limit their main line of business for a tiny big of IP related revenue? It would seem to me, that G, MS, Huawei and all of the various patent holders should be trying their best to remove any and all barriers to adoption. There are enough bureaucratic hurdles in the way to worry about, let alone legal concerns. Even if MS or whoever had to buy out some laggard IP owners who didn't want to play ball, it would probably still make sense for them. Fraunhofer or anyone else are not in that situation, but the behemoths running vast surpluses are, it just seems shortsighted for them to hamstring any of this.
fefe23 6y ago
It's even worse than that. The main driving force behind VVC is AFAIK the Heinrich Hertz Institute, which used to be independent and has now been sucked into the Fraunhofer mothership, which is one of the big research organisations in Germany. Fraunhofer has a budget of over 2 billion Euros, and 30% of their money comes from public funding. They run over 70 institutes, so they do much more than this. The root problem here is that nowadays public research is funded with industry money, which means there has to be a return on investment, hence the patents. In fact, this has metastasized into universities being graded by their patent portfolio volume. So I would expect there to be patents even if 100% of the funding came from the tax payer. It would have been possible to do the whole process just with public money and zero patents. In fact, I would love it if some research team collated all the patent tax payments across the population of Germany and compare the bottom line cost for the country. I wager it would have been cheaper without patents, too.
Const-me 6y ago
> will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar Both h264 and h265 have these implementations, I think FFMPEG library has both under the terms of GPLv2. The decoders are almost completely useless. The video codec, at least the decoder, needs to be in the hardware, not in software. Mobile devices just don’t have the resources to run the decoders on CPU. The code works on PC but consumes too much electricity and thermal budget. Even GPGPUs are not good enough for the job, couple generations ago AMD tried to use shader cores for video codecs, didn’t work well enough and they switched to dedicated silicon like the rest of them.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  > The decoders are almost completely useless. You'd be surprised at how often these are used.
  - Const-me 6y ago
    I wonder why? Even Raspberry Pi has a hardware decoder: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo Linux Kernel support for HEVC is WIP but I’m pretty sure they’ll integrate eventually.
    - f00_ 6y ago
      buying vc1/mpeg licenses to use hardware decoding on raspberry pi's pre-4 was annoying https://codecs.raspberrypi.org/license-keys/ https://codecs.raspberrypi.org/license-keys/ is this because of licensing/copyright?
      - Const-me 6y ago
        Right, now I remember these keys. But the very first Pi already had hardware h264 decoder (and even encoder!) which didn’t need any extra keys to work. No idea how they did it, maybe the license was included in the $25 price. Pi 1 was launched in 2013, at that time h264 has been already widespread, while mpeg-2 use was declining. I think that’s why they did not include the license. It increases price for all users but only useful for very few of them, who connected a USB DVD or BluRay drives to their Pi-s.
shmerl 6y ago
Some never learn. Also surprising to see supporters of this approach in this thread. They are still around apparently.
pornel 6y ago
Copyright != patents. A copyright license for a codec implementation or a spec text doesn't grant you patents for the ideas it contains. A GPL implementation doesn't guarantee a patent grant. Even if you wrote the code yourself, even just for your personal use, your own work could still be illegal to use due to lacking a patent license from the original patent holders. Be careful about using implementations of H.26x codecs, because in countries that recognize software patents the code may be illegal to use, regardless whether you've got a license for the code or not. Even when a FLOSS license says something about patent grants, it's still meaningless if the code author didn't own the patents to grant.

yewenjie 6y ago

Is H.265 released under a GPL-like licenses? If not, how do softwares like Handbrake use it?

speedgoose 6y ago
They use ffmpeg, which is developed by people who do not care about software patents because it doesn't apply to them.
- pault 6y ago
  Why don't the patents apply to them?
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    I don't know for all contributors, but the creator is French and there is no software patents in France.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      All of the French patents listed in this license pool care to disagree: https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        They are not valid in France.
      - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
        Patents are almost always approved fwiw and the FR cases here seem to be linked to worldwide patents. It is not the patent offices job to test the validity of patents. That occurs in a court when someone challenges the patent. This is true of every country, France included. So whilst you have a list of software patents filed worldwide (including France) that's not really relevant to the enforceability of the patent in France. This is also why you see articles from time to time highlight a stupid patent as if it's an outrage that the patent office allowed it. It's not the patent offices job to enforce patents. You can literally go ahead and patent swinging on a swing (1) and the patent office would approve it if the paper work is in order. The media would then likely pick up on this with outrage as if that's an enforceable patent. The truth is that it's simply not the patent offices job. Patents are meant to be enforced by courts. 1: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en
        jcranmer 6y ago
        > It is not the patent offices job to test the validity of patents. Actually, it is (at least in the US). USPTO can deny patents on the basis on nonpatentability, and its general refusal to do so post-State St. decision is often cited as one of the problems of the modern patent system. Broadly speaking, however, if the argument is that software patents are invalid in Europe because they'll be found so by the courts, it should be noted that SCOTUS is actually pretty likely to rule software unpatentable were it to hear a software patent case. A little background is in order: In Parker v Flook (1978), SCOTUS said that mathematical algorithms (i.e., basically software) is unpatentable. In Diamond v Diehr (1981), they said that part of the patent being software doesn't make the entire thing invalid. The big decision is State St (1998), which is a CAFC decision holding that anything was patentable so long as it produced a "useful, concrete, tangible" result and basically broke the patent office. When SCOTUS decided Bilski v Kappos (2008), they emphatically (and unanimously!) called out State St as wrong, but declined to endorse any guidelines as to what the limits of patentability should be. Later Mayo (2012) and Alice (2014) decisions again unanimously and unambiguously laid out what wasn't patentable: natural processes, and "do it on a computer" steps. A few years ago, we had a patent attorney at work tell us (paraphrasing somewhat) that Alice made it really hard to figure out how to write a software patent that wouldn't be invalidated. Their continued existence (and pretense to their enforceability) is less because it's secure and more because no one wants to spend the money to litigate it to the highest level (see also the Google v Oracle case, which is exactly the sort of thing a software patent case history would entail).
  - throwaway8941 6y ago
    Because the developers of x265 (which is the real codec and ffmpeg is a wrapper around it) are located in France. http://www.videolan.org/developers/x265.html http://www.videolan.org/developers/x265.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoLAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoLAN
asjw 6y ago
x265 ffmpeg

p_l 6y ago

The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered, which in turn makes it so that even if they wanted to be open, they go for defensive patents, which in turn perpetuate the situation. At least the patent licenses usually used with MPEG mean that private use of open source implementations is free.

1_player 6y ago
> The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered Why is that?
- mekster 6y ago
  It would be hard to build a new algorithm without stepping on other established algorithms that are patented.
- p_l 6y ago
  Pretty much every method involved in high-efficiency video compression has a patent on it, doesn't matter how small part is involved. Now compound this by the fact that a) trying to make an exhaustive patent search to get a verifiable claim that you don't infringe on any patent is very problematic b) known patent pools like MPEG-LA are known not to cover everything. So you can make a reasonable bet that you avoid infringing patents by avoiding patents from MPEG-LA and few other better known groups, but you can't actually guarantee that you're not infringing on any patents. This resolves, sort of, into a game of chicken and depends heavily on whether a lesser known patent holder decides it's worth it to bother executing against you... but even if they don't, unless they come out with a royalty-free license, the possibility of patent is a Damocles' Sword hanging over your codec.
  - jariel 6y ago
    "make an exhaustive patent search to get a verifiable claim that you don't infringe on any patent" Is there even such a thing? Isn't the problem that one has to actually go to court to get the answer to this question?

CJefferson 6y ago

GPL would seem like a very weird choice -- that would mean it couldn't be put into any closed source product?

jacobush 6y ago
It could still serve as a reference implementation.
- tankenmate 6y ago
  Not only a GPL reference implementation, GPLv3 would preclude patents on any improvements.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    I don’t see how that follows?
    - tankenmate 6y ago
      GPLv3 has a clause that says if you release anything under the license then you have to provide a cost free license to anything that is patented, if you aren't able to provide a license then you aren't allowed to release it under GPLv3. Any modifications to a GPLv3 licensed product has to be released under GPLv3. So yes you are correct, but in effect it might as well be patent free as far as a 3rd party end user is concerned as they have been provided what is in effect a safe harbour.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        It could still be useful if the patents were part of a defence patent portfolio. (Ideally I'd abolish software patents altogether, or set a hard 10 year limit on them together with some kind of mechanism to curb the impact of add-on and submarine patents.)
        6y ago

vbezhenar 6y ago

Patents and open\close source are independent things. OpenH264 is BSD-licensed H.264 implementation, for example.

mtgx 6y ago

What you're looking for is the AV1 codec, which finalized a year and a half ago and will likely see much wider adoption, simply because none of the members want to pay royalties. https://aomedia.org/av1/ https://aomedia.org/av1/ https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ AV1 decoding has already been in Chrome and Firefox since at least a year ago. We're just waiting for hardware decoding and encoding support now, which should start appearing this year. The next version of Chrome will also support the AV1-based AVIF image format this month: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/2276542 https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/22... YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon/Twitch are also likely to not support VVC (and some of them don't support h.265 either) for their streaming services.

pault 6y ago
Your comment was deaded. I vouched for it because I don't see anything that looks obviously inflammatory/incorrect, but I noticed that a large fraction of your comment history is also dead. You might want to look into that, since most of the dead comments also looked fine to me.
throwaway8941 6y ago
>The next version of Chrome will also support the AV1-based AVIF image format this month: FWIW, Firefox supports it already (behind the image.avif.enabled knob).

geodel 6y ago

> perhaps they could swallow the costs? It is 2020 after all. They should swallow so people again come back and say they are doing it to kill competition? Just received bill from doctor's visit for hundreds of dollar, I guess things are not gonna be free in 2020 after all.

Cu3PO42 6y ago
Ironically in Germany, where Fraunhofer is located, you would have received no such bill.

lowwave 6y ago

MIT, FreeBSD will also do.

balls187 6y ago

That's Fraunhofer for you. In the early days of MP3, all MP3 rippers and players were built off of their implementation. Hardware and software companies had to license in order to play MP3 files. As such there was not native support for MP3's for quite some time. In the late 90's right around the explosion of MP3's on the internet, Fraunhofer was going after companies for doing so. In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years.

grishka 6y ago
> In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years. Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer. The initial idea behind patent system was sensible, but the way it's abused now... I mean, it could work in today's world as intended if patents lasted a year or two, not what is effectively eternity.
- trentnix 6y ago
  Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer There are plenty of societies that don't respect intellectual property and copyright. And those societies don't innovate at the rate as those who do. There are certainly abuses in the copyright, trademark, and patent systems. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not the answer. Identifying the abuses and improving the system is the answer. Perhaps that progress won't happen at the rate you'd prefer, but it's significantly better than burning the whole thing to the ground.
  - balls187 6y ago
    > Perhaps that progress won't happen at the rate you'd prefer, but it's significantly better than burning the whole thing to the ground. Changing patent length (pc's suggestion) is hardly seems like burning the whole thing to the ground. In the US, if I understand correctly, there are ways to defend against patent abuse, though it typically involves costly legal fees. Fees many cannot justify in spending. Addressing patent challenges may be a way to protect innovators, both those who should gain reward for their innovations, and those who seek to grain reward by building upon innovations.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Notice that the missing party here was 'Google'. These are the folks who are really competing with VP9, the royalty free codec that limited the uptake of H.265.

derefr 6y ago

Of course, they can't do that, because the source technologies they've put together are themselves patent-encumbered. An AV-codec is a lot like a modern pop song: a piece of IP entirely made up of licensed samples of other people's IP. I think a more subtle "open-sourcing" of this IP could still be possible, though. Maybe one that still requires that large corporate players that are going to sell their derivative products, acquire a license the traditional way (this is, after all, what the contributors to the codec's patent-pool and R&D efforts based their relative-R&D-labor-contribution negotiations around: that each contributor would end up paying for the devices of theirs that run the codec.) Maybe there could be a foundation created under the stewardship of the patent-pool itself, which nominally pays the same per-seat/per-device licensing costs as every other member, but where this money doesn't come from revenue but rather is donated by those other members; and where this foundation then grants open-source projects an automatic but non-transferrable license to use the technology. So, for example, a directly open-source project (e.g. ffmpeg) would be granted an automatic license (for its direct individual users); but that license wouldn't transfer to software that embeds it. Instead, other open-source software (e.g. Handbrake, youtube-dl, etc.) that embeds ffmpeg would acquire its own automatic license (and thus be its own line-item under the foundation); while closed-source software that embeds ffmpeg would be stuck needing a commercial license. Is there already a scheme that works like this?

Cu3PO42 6y ago

Disclaimer: I work at a Fraunhofer institute, though not Fraunhofer HHI, which developed this codec, and I have no intimate knowledge on the financing of that institute or this project in particular. But some basic principles apply to all institutes the same. Fraunhofer gets roughly 30% of its funding from public sources, the remainder is raised on a per-project basis. It's a fair assumption that those industry partners provided some funds towards the development here. Maybe they even covered all the payroll costs for the involved scientists for the duration of the project. And yet more income means more money for other research projects. Maybe ones that are not as commercially interesting, or for which a partner decides to terminate a contract rather unexpectedly. While I am also a fan of OSS and would love for work like this to either have no patents or a liberal patent grant, I can also appreciate the desire to fund your research institute.

epanchin 6y ago
Public sources as in the taxpayer? Why would the taxpayer fund anything that isn’t open and free. Crazy.
- Cu3PO42 6y ago
  Yes, public sources as in the tax payer. It is worth pointing out that Fraunhofer is itself a non-profit organization. The argument that anything funded by tax money must be open is a very fair stance. Though the line gets very blurry when you mix various sources of funding like this. To the best of my recollection I have yet to be paid from any public funding (rather than project specific funding raised from the industry, for example). Personally, I have no qualms with the funding model, but other points of view are presumably equally valid.
  - osrec 6y ago
    Unfortunately, non-profit does not necessarily mean that someone in the organisation isn't amply lining their pockets.
    - 6y ago

jariel 6y ago

Yes, but what does " backed by " mean? Does it mean money, or not? Because if not, then Fraunhofer does not exist. But there is absolutely a problem here, because said 'mega businesses' actually should have a strategic imperative to want to make internet technologies more widespread. Why on earth would MS want to limit their main line of business for a tiny big of IP related revenue? It would seem to me, that G, MS, Huawei and all of the various patent holders should be trying their best to remove any and all barriers to adoption. There are enough bureaucratic hurdles in the way to worry about, let alone legal concerns. Even if MS or whoever had to buy out some laggard IP owners who didn't want to play ball, it would probably still make sense for them. Fraunhofer or anyone else are not in that situation, but the behemoths running vast surpluses are, it just seems shortsighted for them to hamstring any of this.

fefe23 6y ago

It's even worse than that. The main driving force behind VVC is AFAIK the Heinrich Hertz Institute, which used to be independent and has now been sucked into the Fraunhofer mothership, which is one of the big research organisations in Germany. Fraunhofer has a budget of over 2 billion Euros, and 30% of their money comes from public funding. They run over 70 institutes, so they do much more than this. The root problem here is that nowadays public research is funded with industry money, which means there has to be a return on investment, hence the patents. In fact, this has metastasized into universities being graded by their patent portfolio volume. So I would expect there to be patents even if 100% of the funding came from the tax payer. It would have been possible to do the whole process just with public money and zero patents. In fact, I would love it if some research team collated all the patent tax payments across the population of Germany and compare the bottom line cost for the country. I wager it would have been cheaper without patents, too.

Const-me 6y ago

> will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar Both h264 and h265 have these implementations, I think FFMPEG library has both under the terms of GPLv2. The decoders are almost completely useless. The video codec, at least the decoder, needs to be in the hardware, not in software. Mobile devices just don’t have the resources to run the decoders on CPU. The code works on PC but consumes too much electricity and thermal budget. Even GPGPUs are not good enough for the job, couple generations ago AMD tried to use shader cores for video codecs, didn’t work well enough and they switched to dedicated silicon like the rest of them.

Denvercoder9 6y ago
> The decoders are almost completely useless. You'd be surprised at how often these are used.
- Const-me 6y ago
  I wonder why? Even Raspberry Pi has a hardware decoder: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo Linux Kernel support for HEVC is WIP but I’m pretty sure they’ll integrate eventually.
  - f00_ 6y ago
    buying vc1/mpeg licenses to use hardware decoding on raspberry pi's pre-4 was annoying https://codecs.raspberrypi.org/license-keys/ https://codecs.raspberrypi.org/license-keys/ is this because of licensing/copyright?
    - Const-me 6y ago
      Right, now I remember these keys. But the very first Pi already had hardware h264 decoder (and even encoder!) which didn’t need any extra keys to work. No idea how they did it, maybe the license was included in the $25 price. Pi 1 was launched in 2013, at that time h264 has been already widespread, while mpeg-2 use was declining. I think that’s why they did not include the license. It increases price for all users but only useful for very few of them, who connected a USB DVD or BluRay drives to their Pi-s.

shmerl 6y ago

Some never learn. Also surprising to see supporters of this approach in this thread. They are still around apparently.

pornel 6y ago

Copyright != patents. A copyright license for a codec implementation or a spec text doesn't grant you patents for the ideas it contains. A GPL implementation doesn't guarantee a patent grant. Even if you wrote the code yourself, even just for your personal use, your own work could still be illegal to use due to lacking a patent license from the original patent holders. Be careful about using implementations of H.26x codecs, because in countries that recognize software patents the code may be illegal to use, regardless whether you've got a license for the code or not. Even when a FLOSS license says something about patent grants, it's still meaningless if the code author didn't own the patents to grant.