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Lenovo seeks to render Nokia's H.264 patents unenforceable

226 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

dzdt 6y ago
The public interest is that interoperability standards should not require patented technology at all to implement. The point of an interoperability standard is to allow a broad ecosystem with many producers and many consumers. Here many producers of videos, many producers of video-processing and video-displaying technology, many consumers of these videos and associated technology. The public interest is that the ecosystem should be vibrant, with easy access to new participants and low barriers to entry. So, in the public interest, go Lenovo! Especially considering the slime-ball tactics that Nokia apparently used here.
- tilt_error 6y ago
  Indeed, give them the rubber boot!
- staticautomatic 6y ago
  It’s not a very good system but in theory this is what RAND licensing schemes in standards bodies are for.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  > looks at HDMI[a] But you’re absolutely correct. Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standard. [a]: I think it’s like a US$10k “membership fee” just to have the privilege of looking at the standard
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    > Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standard. While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". It's a piece of work, still, and the creators should be allowed to earn money with it. I'd personally prefer if all standards are free, since especially with an obscure one you're SOL when it's locked behind a paywall; with H.264, you can probably find a way around. But its hard to combine that with intellectual property. Limiting the patent timeframe to five or ten years might be a good middle ground.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      That is a very valid argument. I think the big problem (for me at least) is that these patents are (essentially) on math, just “done on a computer”. Sure, it’s math that would be impractical to do by hand, but it’s still just math. That’s the rub for me.
      - newswasboring 6y ago
        You don't think mathematical ideas should be patentable?
    - xoa 6y ago
      >While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". No, it's "if you're successful by NORMALLY ILLEGAL COLLUSION, than the ways in which you're allowed to earn money may be restricted." That's what "encumbered standards" are at the end of the day, explicitly established horizontal monopolies. Those mathematics patents covering H.264 wouldn't be worth remotely the same if there were a hundred different video formats going around of which only 1 or 2 used them. Or if everyone had just stuck with MPEG-2. Of course, the world would also overall be worse off in those cases too, with an even higher risk of vertical monopolies, wasted hardware/bandwidth, etc. So it makes sense to have a middle ground, to allow "standards" to grow the total pie non-linearly larger than it would have been otherwise. But at the same time that needs to be combined with much more stringent controls to avoid all the normal obvious risks of monopolies. Actors like Nokia and Qualcomm have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They like the enormous monopoly lock-in value the standards give their patents, but then they also want to treat them like normal individual patents they can cut deals around. That's not how it should work. The reward for a Standards Essential Patent should be a reliable, fair fixed cut of a very, very big and dependable pie for the life of the patents/pool. Companies have the choice to go it alone if they'd like instead and not join the standard, which can then seek to work around them (or if that's impossible, disband and give up and at least not form any monopoly there). But if they have patents in a standard, they should face more restrictions due to the extra monopoly. It should be one or the other, not both.
    - derf_ 6y ago
  - iso1631 6y ago
    SDI is just so much better than HDMI though, single cable which you can make yourself, really cheaply, to be 36cm, or 3m97, or 28m14, or whatever. What does HDMI offer than SDI doesn't?
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      You’re not wrong, but the biggest thing is wider support. I’ve only seen SDI available on expensive camera gear (but I don’t look that hard), but HDMI is ubiquitous. It’s sad DisplayPort didn’t end up winning instead, but I guess TV manufacturers are members, so they’d put it in the TVs. DisplayPort still has a stupid “membership fee” but at least it’s royalty free.
      - selectodude 6y ago
        SDI doesn’t have the built in encryption so you’ll never see it on something that supports playback.
        kaszanka 6y ago
        DRM really does ruin everything, eh?
    - snops 6y ago
      The DDC interface, which is an I2C bus that allows for bidirectional communications to read EDID data, so you know what you are plugging into. Hot plug detection via the HPD line, so you can tell if you are plugged in or not. Embedded 5V power, very useful for conversion dongles, ethernet, probably more things I forget. HDMI has a lot of pins, which makes DIY cables difficult, however they are useful.
      - iso1631 6y ago
        You (your hardware) can tell if SDI is plugged in if the line is terminated with 75 ohms (SDI allows looping through to multiple drops) I can't think of any time I've ever used anything on a HDMI that uses power -- my HDMI to SDI converters (or vice versa) have separate power so it can't be very reliable and/or powerful I guess EDID data can be useful in the computing space for feeding back from the monitor.
  - cornstalks 6y ago
    H.264 is publicly available for free from ITU's website: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 It's annoying because multiple standards bodies all publish the same spec, which is why H.264 is also called "MPEG-4 Part 10" because the spec is part of the MPEG-4 spec published in ISO/IEC 14496 (part 10 for AVC). The ISO specs aren't free (a couple hundred USD for the AVC spec), which is the most annoying part. You can get the H.263/H.264/H.265 specs for free form ITU, which covers a lot of the details you need for writing an encoder/decoder. Unfortunately sometimes you need the ISO specs for other things related to these codecs (e.g., ISO BMFF stuff). (edit: I'm a dork and originally misread the comment as saying it was $10k for the H.264 spec, when parent meant the HDMI spec; I removed parts of my comment that were related to that misreading).
    - willglynn 6y ago
      ISO/IEC 14496-10 is actually one of the free standards: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ Presumably this is because H.264 is public. Your complaint is well founded, though: if you've built an AVC codec using public documents you may be frustrated to learn that ISO/IEC 14496-14 (describing the MP4 file format) and ISO/IEC 14496-15 (describing the AVC elementary stream and how to encode it as an MP4) are not public. It's also worth noting that ISO removes public standards. You may find references to public standards, like the link at https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html – but neither the linked ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014 nor any other version of the MPEG-DASH standard is available to the public at this time. Pay up!
      - userbinator 6y ago
        You can of course find a lot of those paid standards in the usual places... ;-) IMHO the generally lax attitude towards IP is one of the reasons responsible for China's strong technological growth.
- room500 6y ago
  AV1 is an open codec that I hope will be the industry standard soon. It already has the support of the ecosystem (apple, google, qualcomm, netflix, etc). Unfortunately, it just takes a while to build that momentum So there is light at the end of the tunnel
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > (apple, google, qualcomm, netflix, etc). And out them, only Apple, and Qcom are hardware makers, and both have dropped the ball on AV1. Qcom removed AV1 from latest snapdragon, and Apple haven't put it into M1 despite being one of first in the AV1 crowd. The momentum is lost, and thus is the war. H265 is already a new de-facto standard by the virtue of it getting first to the hardware, while AV1 crowd was apparently arguing over whose logo design would AV1 bear, and exact legalese wording.
    - loufe 6y ago
      Both the new AMD and NVidia graphics cards and the intel CPUs support hardware decoding of AV1. I wouldn't count it out just yet. x265 has been released for many, many years and yet it's not fully adopted by a long shot. Transitioning to new technologies takes time and a step back doesn't proclude a step forward again, in the case of Qcom. Especially considering AV1 is free, more efficient than x265, and pushed forward by powerful actors.
      - selectodude 6y ago
        Hardware decoding is nothing more than a nice to have on desktops. On mobile, it’s mandatory. HEVC is the only format you can be assured will work there.
        izacus 6y ago
        And AVC. And VP9.
        grishka 6y ago
- rayiner 6y ago
  These standards aren’t just “plug C is 0.25 inches wide.” They are intimately tied to the compression technology itself. Developing new standards involves developing new compression technology, building and testing reference implementations, iterating, etc. All that costs money to develop. That will get paid for one way or the other. What way that happens affects the public interest analysis. Look what happened with web standards. Developing and testing new web standards requires building reference implementations in browsers. Browsers are expensive to develop, so the standards are controlled by a handful of companies like Google and Apple. But the standards are free to implement. Is that better for the public? Maybe, but the public interest analysis is more complex than “free to implement.” There is no such thing as “free.” R&D will be monetized somehow—the question is how. Different monetization approaches have different and non-obvious impacts on the public interest. Consider for example the shift away from paying for software to giving it away “free.” You used to pay Symbian $5-10 bucks per phone for an OS. Android you can get for free. But Symbian didn’t build an advertising platform into the core of each phone. Monetization matters.
  - damnyou 6y ago
    I'd be more sympathetic if the money were mostly going to the engineers and researchers who did the work, not a bunch of corporate fat cats.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      My point has nothing to do with sympathy. I’m talking about the impact on the public of monetizing R&D one way versus another. Additionally, the companies pay the salaries of engineers and researchers who did the work. If your point is that engineers and researchers don’t get paid enough for the value they create, you’re talking about a completely distinct issue that has more to do with the structure of corporations generally.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      It takes more than engineers to make a standard. The organizational infrastructure, investment in those engineers, associated risks if the investment doesn't bear fruit, engagement with the capital markets necessary to provide the financial infrastructure to keep the blood flow of money pumping... There's a heck of a lot more going to make any moderate R&D project happen. Why is the engineer more important than the many people required to make the organization function in a way that makes the engineer's work possible in the first place? Maybe people at the top get too much of the compensation, but what about the network technicians and IT departments that provided a functional work environment? What about building maintenance? What is harder, the research involved, or learning & navigating knowledge of the legal and financial mechanisms necessary for large complex organizations with a thousand interlinking pieces to other organizations? Who should get more compensation when the absence of any one component, not just the researchers, might have caused failure? I want to be clear though: I'm not defending astronomical compensation of the very few at the top. I'm saying that if there's inequity here, it doesn't begin or end with the engineers and researchers. Its victims are the sum total of all the people, all of the functions, without which the system fails.
- btown 6y ago
  At the very least there should be a global irrevocable license to implement the standard exactly. I imagine this could still allow the patent holder strong rights if any other party were to deviate or iterate on the standard. But it’s insane to me that standardization bodies don’t insist on this.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    There's a whole body of law that's grown up around compulsory licensing for standard-essential patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat... The issue here is that Nokia allegedly has patents that are infringed by the standard, and didn't disclose them to the standards body.
  - chaosharmonic 6y ago
    Some of them do, at least now. The Alliance for Open Media, for one, has terms that revoke your license to relevant patents if you sue anyone for implementing the spec.
- ksec 6y ago
  Ignoring the Lenovo vs Nokia case here because it really has nothing to do with video patents other than two company having disagreement. >The public interest is that interoperability standards should not require patented technology at all to implement. That is what EVC [1] Baseline Profile is. Basically bringing in all the tools from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / H.264 that have patnets expired or soon to be expired ( by the time finalised ). It is expected to be somewhat better than AVC High Profile but not as good as HEVC. ( Which I should remind everyone this claim seems too good to be true and requires 3rd party testing to verify ) It is interesting because a lot of the original purposed tools for H.264 were deemed far too complex for hardware at the time and were not accepted into the standard. Now 20 years later those tools are being put into good use. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Video_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Video_Coding
- eikenberry 6y ago
  IMO patents (the idea) are not the problem, they are a reasonable system for funding the work. The problem is that while patents (the implementation) are about money they don't apply to money, they apply to the freedom to utilize the patented work. Patents should not limit freedom, they should funnel some of the money made from the patented work back to the people who did the work. If money isn't involved the patent shouldn't come up. IE. if you aren't making money from a patent you should be free to use it as you want. To put it another way, we shouldn't put arbitrary restrictions on freedom in exchange for money.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- beervirus 6y ago
  >standards should not require patented technology at all to implement Do we really want every standard to rely only on ideas that are so old that the patents have all expired? FRAND licensing seems like a far better solution.
zinekeller 6y ago
Someone should review what happened in Microsoft v Motorola here: if Nokia knowingly withheld information about patents they owned that will affect H.264 licensing and Nokia is on the H.264 WG, then what will happen is that the patent is not invalidated but not enforced (effectively enforced royalty-free licensing) if a manufacturer wants to make a conforming H.264 decoder (as H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1 is defined only for decoding and the main reason that encoders may vary in their quality and performance). For encoding, any patent that is not necessary to make a conforming H.264 stream (in other words, to enhance H.264 quality and performance) is negotiated outside of FRAND conditions (but in common H.264 practice is also available to licensing through MPEG LA). If the patents are solely used to enhance H.264 encoding quality or performance, then Lenovo doesn't have any chance here (as these falls out of scope in the WG contract Nokia signed with ITU/ISO), but if the patents pertains to the decoding side (like Microsoft v Motorola), then Nokia will not be able to enforce the patents, at least for the H.264 standard. Edit: Personal opinion: this is H.265ing H.264 and I hate it. Edit edit: Lenovo is trying to pass some contested patents that was properly declared by Nokia before ITU/ISO as not properly declared: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398403 Final edit: I gave up reviewing Nokia's declarations after finding matches in the filing. Apparently, the so-called contested patents (at least those that I have checked) were called differently when Nokia submitted the declaration (Lenovo's legal reviewed the patent numbers but did not looked if they matched the filing number). I have looked at some contested patents and it seems that Nokia did declare them properly as far back as 2002, so I genuinely don't know what Lenovo is trying to claim here. Accordingly, I let others complete the review here.
stefan_ 6y ago
Nokia is trying the ole Qualcomm strategy, refuse to license patents to chip makers, then try to extract x% of a finished car or a finished laptop from Daimler/Lenovo because somewhere in the $100/$1k product there is a dollar value chip that does H264 decoding. That won't come to pass, of course.
- latch 6y ago
  How's this different than ARM? That something is cheap to manufacturer says a ton more about the huge advancements in semiconductors than it says about any value of what that chip does. It's fine to dislike patents, but I don't think this reasoning is sound.
  - xoa 6y ago
    >How's this different than ARM? What!? ARM doesn't do any standards essential stuff, they just developed their own ISA. And they have a massive array of options, from their own ready to go cores all the way up to perpetual architecture licenses that someone can do whatever they want with (so long as it's conformant) indefinitely. How is that remotely similar to something like codec or wireless standards? ARM is about as polar opposite from "refuse to license to for chips, try to extract based on patents for the whole device" as it gets. Their entire business is based around licensing to chip makers with nothing to do with the rest of the device. And if they ever tried such a thing, well first of all it wouldn't affect their perpetual licensees at all, and second everyone would just move to RISC-V or whatever. Software patents are all wrong and should be eliminated anyway, IP value there and development incensitves are covered more than sufficiently by copyright. But it's much worse in what are literally monopoly collusion cases in the good sense, aka "standards". Normally even having a patent doesn't give an entity any special privileges against anti-trust there, they have a monopoly on their own patent but they can't seek to force everyone to use it illegally. Standards though are of great value, and while being horizontal monopolies can be very important in preventing vertical monopolies. Plus they're key when dealing with hard and soft natural monopolies, such as utilization of EM spectrum or content formats. But the counter to that is supposed to be that while everyone in the pool gets a fair cut, they also give up their rights of discrimination or exclusivity. Anyone who doesn't do that for a SEP should have the book brought down on them hard.
knuthsat 6y ago
I don't know if I remember this correctly but it sounded to me like these patents are just regurgitation of open source efforts. A bunch of algorithms just stolen from the open source codebases.
- seg_lol 6y ago
  And bunch of them just alter constants and/or apply filters or convolutions at different steps. One reads this stuff and will continually ask them selves, "this is patentable?' It is if you are at the right place and the right time, which is shame and a sham because then the patent system rewards the corps with the deep pockets that s()it on standards bodies.
  - zinekeller 6y ago
    Is it really open-source though? As I looked at the patents, most were filed in the late '90s (don't ask me how the grant were delayed by ~5 years, I also don't know this). The main question is that the techniques discussed in the patents were prior art before 1999? Because chanting "open source" is not really helpful here unless there are code that exists then that matches the patents.
    - toast0 6y ago
      5 year delay before granting isn't terribly unusual based on my experience with the USPTO. It takes about a year for your patent to get to the examiner, then they might have comments or questions, which it takes some time to address, then it tskes some time to get back to the top of the examiner's queue. If they deny, and you appeal, it doesn't take too much to get to 5 years. Of course, there were some games you could play to delay almost forever, read about submarine patents, and US patent rules changed in mid 2000s for patents filed after that date, the patent exclusive use period starts when the patent is filed, not when it's issued. Any patents still pending from before that will have an exclusive use period starting on issuance, if issued.
xoa 6y ago
One question that's been bugging more with regard to these older encumbered standards as we get into the 2020s: does anyone know if there has been an exhaustive search of when they go patent free? H.264 Version 1 was 2003, and Version 3 (which added the high profiles, so it's probably by far the most common by this point) was 2005. So worst-case scenario, we're 3-5 years from any possible patent being expired. But in most cases standards patents have priority dates at least a year or two before, because negotiations happen well before standard official finalization (first draft in this case was sometime in 1999 or 2000 IIRC) and patent holders who try to keep it a secret and apply at the last moment risk getting cut out or having someone else come up with it and neutralize them. I remember a lot of people were watching for when MP3 went patent free, and it'd be interesting if there was a site keeping track of when some of these other still commonly used standards did the same. Patents last relatively way too long in the tech world, but even here it's not forever.
- est31 6y ago
  https://www.osnews.com/story/24954/us-patent-expiration-for-mp3-mpeg-2-h264/ https://www.osnews.com/story/24954/us-patent-expiration-for-... > H.264 is a newer video codec. The standard first came out in 2003, but continues to evolve. An automatically generated patent expiration list is available at H.264 Patent List based on the MPEG-LA patent list. The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027 ( note that 7835443 is divisional, but the automated program missed that). US 7826532 was first filed in 05 sep 2003 and has an impressive 1546 day extension. It will be a while before H.264 is patent free. The automatically generated list that this quote talks about also lists US 7835443, which expires in 2028...
  - hedora 6y ago
    Surely the publication of the standard 17 years ago constitutes public disclosure and/or prior work. Using extensions to increase the working lifespan of a patent to 25 years (as done here, apparently) really shouldn’t be allowed. It’s one thing if the work is under development during filing or something, but we’re talking about an openly published standardized technology. Patent lifespan should be limited to the minimum of 17 years from filing (or maybe grant date), and 17 years from publication/commercialization.
zinekeller 6y ago
I have found that at least one of the patents contested (U.S. Patent No. 6,879,268, formerly filed as 10/054,610) was indeed properly declared by Nokia back in 2002 [1]. 1: https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/04/07/T040700053E0001PDFE.pdf https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/04/07/T040700053E0001P... Edit: I have found other contested patents that were properly declared but I already said quits and let the courts decide on this. Final edit: I gave up reviewing Nokia's declarations after finding matches in the filing. Apparently, the so-called contested patents (at least those that I have checked) were called differently when Nokia submitted the declaration (Lenovo's legal reviewed the patent numbers but did not looked if they matched the filing number). I have looked at some contested patents and it seems that Nokia did declare them properly as far back as 2002, so I genuinely don't know what Lenovo is trying to claim here. Accordingly, I let others complete the review here.
- xbar 6y ago
  So, Lenovo, who was not party to the standard definition, is looking for a free ride on properly disclosed IP by claiming that the undisclosed IP makes the properly disclosed IP unenforceable. Suck it up and pay, Lenovo.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Fun fact: there was an attempt by the MPEG working group to design a non-patent-encumbered internet video format. It was killed late in the process by several companies making patent claims on the finished standard, without saying which patents were infringed, therefore making it impossible for the standard to be reworked.
- yboris 6y ago
  I'm not doubting your story, I'm just curious how is that legally possible? I thought in the US you're innocent until proven guilty.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    It's very difficult to preemptively establish that something is not encumbered by a patent, which is what the group releasing the standard would have to do to make the standard adoptable. If someone successfully claims the standard infringes their patent after it is released, it failed to accomplish the goal.
  - est31 6y ago
    First, that's a principle of the penal system, not the civil courts which would decide such matters. Second, this didn't involve any legal action at all, and was instead just as a threat, basically saying that if they went forward with the standard, they would sue companies that invested into the standard, but by that point the companies would be in a bad situation as they'd have invested tremendous resources into the codec. The moment you make any kind of non trivial program (say 20k lines and above) you almost guaranteed violate some patent so they were probably even right with their claims.
    - dancodes 6y ago
      If your last statement is true, how come there are companies working on software every day and not getting sued constantly?
      - 6y ago
zoobab 6y ago
FFII is crowdfunding a lawsuit against the UPC, which will enforce software patents in Europe: https://ffii.org/bundestag-vote-for-unitary-software-patents-ffii-call-on-software-companies-to-donate/ https://ffii.org/bundestag-vote-for-unitary-software-patents...
varispeed 6y ago
Sadly patents are mostly used to protect a _discovery_ rather than _invention_. Who finds something first gets the cake and so on. For example when I was playing with digital synthesis, it felt natural for me to modulate the phase within the grain of sample and then I learned it has been patented by Casio. Then recently I read about so called TMT technology, where company essentially patented adding tolerance to components when simulating circuits... I mean d'oh? If you want to do realistic simulation, that's one of the things to take into account, but now that it is patented, good luck. This whole thing needs to be scrapped.
- patentatt 6y ago
  Just because it ‘felt natural’ doesn’t imply that it’s a discovery rather than invention. Generally in IP the word discovery is in regard to a natural phenomenon, something found in nature. Natural laws are discovered, everything else is invented. So what you describe sounds like an invention rather than a discovery.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    I would disagree. For example phase is one of the parameters of the grain, so to modulate the phase how come it an invention, but to modulate a filter cut off is not? The same tolerance is inherent part of analogue component, as it is very difficult to achieve exact value of e.g. capacitance, so components are manufactured with different levels of tolerance, so if you simply acknowledge this fact of life in your simulation how is that an invention?
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    At least US has a carve-out for obviousness to people in the field. It has been chipped away at for a long time, so there might not be anything left of it.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      The TMT I was talking about has gone through fairly recently. Please take a look https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170060527A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170060527A1/en It's crazy.
hedora 6y ago
It sounds like some of the patents were granted after standardization was complete. That’s incredibly sketchy. For all we know, they incorporate third party IP that Nokia derived from the standardization process. I imagine Nokia would be hard-pressed to prove this isn’t the case.
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
I understand the need for patents. But the length of patents is absurd. 20 years for each of, what is basically a single piece of a huge puzzle, is absurd. Especially in tech, where most of the things are obsolete way sooner.
silexia 6y ago
Patents are a nightmare for innovation and are used by bullies and criminals to crush improved operations. Patents are simply a money grab. No one should be able to own an idea... They can own their business and compete in the free market. This is how the worst corporations that we all hate stay alive... Patents. Look at Oracle for example.

226 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

dzdt 6y ago

The public interest is that interoperability standards should not require patented technology at all to implement. The point of an interoperability standard is to allow a broad ecosystem with many producers and many consumers. Here many producers of videos, many producers of video-processing and video-displaying technology, many consumers of these videos and associated technology. The public interest is that the ecosystem should be vibrant, with easy access to new participants and low barriers to entry. So, in the public interest, go Lenovo! Especially considering the slime-ball tactics that Nokia apparently used here.

tilt_error 6y ago
Indeed, give them the rubber boot!
staticautomatic 6y ago
It’s not a very good system but in theory this is what RAND licensing schemes in standards bodies are for.
colejohnson66 6y ago
> looks at HDMI[a] But you’re absolutely correct. Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standard. [a]: I think it’s like a US$10k “membership fee” just to have the privilege of looking at the standard
- Sebb767 6y ago
  > Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standard. While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". It's a piece of work, still, and the creators should be allowed to earn money with it. I'd personally prefer if all standards are free, since especially with an obscure one you're SOL when it's locked behind a paywall; with H.264, you can probably find a way around. But its hard to combine that with intellectual property. Limiting the patent timeframe to five or ten years might be a good middle ground.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    That is a very valid argument. I think the big problem (for me at least) is that these patents are (essentially) on math, just “done on a computer”. Sure, it’s math that would be impractical to do by hand, but it’s still just math. That’s the rub for me.
    - newswasboring 6y ago
      You don't think mathematical ideas should be patentable?
  - xoa 6y ago
    >While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". No, it's "if you're successful by NORMALLY ILLEGAL COLLUSION, than the ways in which you're allowed to earn money may be restricted." That's what "encumbered standards" are at the end of the day, explicitly established horizontal monopolies. Those mathematics patents covering H.264 wouldn't be worth remotely the same if there were a hundred different video formats going around of which only 1 or 2 used them. Or if everyone had just stuck with MPEG-2. Of course, the world would also overall be worse off in those cases too, with an even higher risk of vertical monopolies, wasted hardware/bandwidth, etc. So it makes sense to have a middle ground, to allow "standards" to grow the total pie non-linearly larger than it would have been otherwise. But at the same time that needs to be combined with much more stringent controls to avoid all the normal obvious risks of monopolies. Actors like Nokia and Qualcomm have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They like the enormous monopoly lock-in value the standards give their patents, but then they also want to treat them like normal individual patents they can cut deals around. That's not how it should work. The reward for a Standards Essential Patent should be a reliable, fair fixed cut of a very, very big and dependable pie for the life of the patents/pool. Companies have the choice to go it alone if they'd like instead and not join the standard, which can then seek to work around them (or if that's impossible, disband and give up and at least not form any monopoly there). But if they have patents in a standard, they should face more restrictions due to the extra monopoly. It should be one or the other, not both.
  - derf_ 6y ago
- iso1631 6y ago
  SDI is just so much better than HDMI though, single cable which you can make yourself, really cheaply, to be 36cm, or 3m97, or 28m14, or whatever. What does HDMI offer than SDI doesn't?
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    You’re not wrong, but the biggest thing is wider support. I’ve only seen SDI available on expensive camera gear (but I don’t look that hard), but HDMI is ubiquitous. It’s sad DisplayPort didn’t end up winning instead, but I guess TV manufacturers are members, so they’d put it in the TVs. DisplayPort still has a stupid “membership fee” but at least it’s royalty free.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      SDI doesn’t have the built in encryption so you’ll never see it on something that supports playback.
      - kaszanka 6y ago
        DRM really does ruin everything, eh?
  - snops 6y ago
    The DDC interface, which is an I2C bus that allows for bidirectional communications to read EDID data, so you know what you are plugging into. Hot plug detection via the HPD line, so you can tell if you are plugged in or not. Embedded 5V power, very useful for conversion dongles, ethernet, probably more things I forget. HDMI has a lot of pins, which makes DIY cables difficult, however they are useful.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      You (your hardware) can tell if SDI is plugged in if the line is terminated with 75 ohms (SDI allows looping through to multiple drops) I can't think of any time I've ever used anything on a HDMI that uses power -- my HDMI to SDI converters (or vice versa) have separate power so it can't be very reliable and/or powerful I guess EDID data can be useful in the computing space for feeding back from the monitor.
- cornstalks 6y ago
  H.264 is publicly available for free from ITU's website: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 It's annoying because multiple standards bodies all publish the same spec, which is why H.264 is also called "MPEG-4 Part 10" because the spec is part of the MPEG-4 spec published in ISO/IEC 14496 (part 10 for AVC). The ISO specs aren't free (a couple hundred USD for the AVC spec), which is the most annoying part. You can get the H.263/H.264/H.265 specs for free form ITU, which covers a lot of the details you need for writing an encoder/decoder. Unfortunately sometimes you need the ISO specs for other things related to these codecs (e.g., ISO BMFF stuff). (edit: I'm a dork and originally misread the comment as saying it was $10k for the H.264 spec, when parent meant the HDMI spec; I removed parts of my comment that were related to that misreading).
  - willglynn 6y ago
    ISO/IEC 14496-10 is actually one of the free standards: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ Presumably this is because H.264 is public. Your complaint is well founded, though: if you've built an AVC codec using public documents you may be frustrated to learn that ISO/IEC 14496-14 (describing the MP4 file format) and ISO/IEC 14496-15 (describing the AVC elementary stream and how to encode it as an MP4) are not public. It's also worth noting that ISO removes public standards. You may find references to public standards, like the link at https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html – but neither the linked ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014 nor any other version of the MPEG-DASH standard is available to the public at this time. Pay up!
    - userbinator 6y ago
      You can of course find a lot of those paid standards in the usual places... ;-) IMHO the generally lax attitude towards IP is one of the reasons responsible for China's strong technological growth.
room500 6y ago
AV1 is an open codec that I hope will be the industry standard soon. It already has the support of the ecosystem (apple, google, qualcomm, netflix, etc). Unfortunately, it just takes a while to build that momentum So there is light at the end of the tunnel
- baybal2 6y ago
  > (apple, google, qualcomm, netflix, etc). And out them, only Apple, and Qcom are hardware makers, and both have dropped the ball on AV1. Qcom removed AV1 from latest snapdragon, and Apple haven't put it into M1 despite being one of first in the AV1 crowd. The momentum is lost, and thus is the war. H265 is already a new de-facto standard by the virtue of it getting first to the hardware, while AV1 crowd was apparently arguing over whose logo design would AV1 bear, and exact legalese wording.
  - loufe 6y ago
    Both the new AMD and NVidia graphics cards and the intel CPUs support hardware decoding of AV1. I wouldn't count it out just yet. x265 has been released for many, many years and yet it's not fully adopted by a long shot. Transitioning to new technologies takes time and a step back doesn't proclude a step forward again, in the case of Qcom. Especially considering AV1 is free, more efficient than x265, and pushed forward by powerful actors.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      Hardware decoding is nothing more than a nice to have on desktops. On mobile, it’s mandatory. HEVC is the only format you can be assured will work there.
      - izacus 6y ago
        And AVC. And VP9.
        grishka 6y ago
rayiner 6y ago
These standards aren’t just “plug C is 0.25 inches wide.” They are intimately tied to the compression technology itself. Developing new standards involves developing new compression technology, building and testing reference implementations, iterating, etc. All that costs money to develop. That will get paid for one way or the other. What way that happens affects the public interest analysis. Look what happened with web standards. Developing and testing new web standards requires building reference implementations in browsers. Browsers are expensive to develop, so the standards are controlled by a handful of companies like Google and Apple. But the standards are free to implement. Is that better for the public? Maybe, but the public interest analysis is more complex than “free to implement.” There is no such thing as “free.” R&D will be monetized somehow—the question is how. Different monetization approaches have different and non-obvious impacts on the public interest. Consider for example the shift away from paying for software to giving it away “free.” You used to pay Symbian $5-10 bucks per phone for an OS. Android you can get for free. But Symbian didn’t build an advertising platform into the core of each phone. Monetization matters.
- damnyou 6y ago
  I'd be more sympathetic if the money were mostly going to the engineers and researchers who did the work, not a bunch of corporate fat cats.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    My point has nothing to do with sympathy. I’m talking about the impact on the public of monetizing R&D one way versus another. Additionally, the companies pay the salaries of engineers and researchers who did the work. If your point is that engineers and researchers don’t get paid enough for the value they create, you’re talking about a completely distinct issue that has more to do with the structure of corporations generally.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    It takes more than engineers to make a standard. The organizational infrastructure, investment in those engineers, associated risks if the investment doesn't bear fruit, engagement with the capital markets necessary to provide the financial infrastructure to keep the blood flow of money pumping... There's a heck of a lot more going to make any moderate R&D project happen. Why is the engineer more important than the many people required to make the organization function in a way that makes the engineer's work possible in the first place? Maybe people at the top get too much of the compensation, but what about the network technicians and IT departments that provided a functional work environment? What about building maintenance? What is harder, the research involved, or learning & navigating knowledge of the legal and financial mechanisms necessary for large complex organizations with a thousand interlinking pieces to other organizations? Who should get more compensation when the absence of any one component, not just the researchers, might have caused failure? I want to be clear though: I'm not defending astronomical compensation of the very few at the top. I'm saying that if there's inequity here, it doesn't begin or end with the engineers and researchers. Its victims are the sum total of all the people, all of the functions, without which the system fails.
btown 6y ago
At the very least there should be a global irrevocable license to implement the standard exactly. I imagine this could still allow the patent holder strong rights if any other party were to deviate or iterate on the standard. But it’s insane to me that standardization bodies don’t insist on this.
- beervirus 6y ago
  There's a whole body of law that's grown up around compulsory licensing for standard-essential patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat... The issue here is that Nokia allegedly has patents that are infringed by the standard, and didn't disclose them to the standards body.
- chaosharmonic 6y ago
  Some of them do, at least now. The Alliance for Open Media, for one, has terms that revoke your license to relevant patents if you sue anyone for implementing the spec.
ksec 6y ago
Ignoring the Lenovo vs Nokia case here because it really has nothing to do with video patents other than two company having disagreement. >The public interest is that interoperability standards should not require patented technology at all to implement. That is what EVC [1] Baseline Profile is. Basically bringing in all the tools from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / H.264 that have patnets expired or soon to be expired ( by the time finalised ). It is expected to be somewhat better than AVC High Profile but not as good as HEVC. ( Which I should remind everyone this claim seems too good to be true and requires 3rd party testing to verify ) It is interesting because a lot of the original purposed tools for H.264 were deemed far too complex for hardware at the time and were not accepted into the standard. Now 20 years later those tools are being put into good use. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Video_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Video_Coding
eikenberry 6y ago
IMO patents (the idea) are not the problem, they are a reasonable system for funding the work. The problem is that while patents (the implementation) are about money they don't apply to money, they apply to the freedom to utilize the patented work. Patents should not limit freedom, they should funnel some of the money made from the patented work back to the people who did the work. If money isn't involved the patent shouldn't come up. IE. if you aren't making money from a patent you should be free to use it as you want. To put it another way, we shouldn't put arbitrary restrictions on freedom in exchange for money.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
beervirus 6y ago
>standards should not require patented technology at all to implement Do we really want every standard to rely only on ideas that are so old that the patents have all expired? FRAND licensing seems like a far better solution.

zinekeller 6y ago

Someone should review what happened in Microsoft v Motorola here: if Nokia knowingly withheld information about patents they owned that will affect H.264 licensing and Nokia is on the H.264 WG, then what will happen is that the patent is not invalidated but not enforced (effectively enforced royalty-free licensing) if a manufacturer wants to make a conforming H.264 decoder (as H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1 is defined only for decoding and the main reason that encoders may vary in their quality and performance). For encoding, any patent that is not necessary to make a conforming H.264 stream (in other words, to enhance H.264 quality and performance) is negotiated outside of FRAND conditions (but in common H.264 practice is also available to licensing through MPEG LA). If the patents are solely used to enhance H.264 encoding quality or performance, then Lenovo doesn't have any chance here (as these falls out of scope in the WG contract Nokia signed with ITU/ISO), but if the patents pertains to the decoding side (like Microsoft v Motorola), then Nokia will not be able to enforce the patents, at least for the H.264 standard. Edit: Personal opinion: this is H.265ing H.264 and I hate it. Edit edit: Lenovo is trying to pass some contested patents that was properly declared by Nokia before ITU/ISO as not properly declared: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398403 Final edit: I gave up reviewing Nokia's declarations after finding matches in the filing. Apparently, the so-called contested patents (at least those that I have checked) were called differently when Nokia submitted the declaration (Lenovo's legal reviewed the patent numbers but did not looked if they matched the filing number). I have looked at some contested patents and it seems that Nokia did declare them properly as far back as 2002, so I genuinely don't know what Lenovo is trying to claim here. Accordingly, I let others complete the review here.

stefan_ 6y ago

Nokia is trying the ole Qualcomm strategy, refuse to license patents to chip makers, then try to extract x% of a finished car or a finished laptop from Daimler/Lenovo because somewhere in the $100/$1k product there is a dollar value chip that does H264 decoding. That won't come to pass, of course.

latch 6y ago
How's this different than ARM? That something is cheap to manufacturer says a ton more about the huge advancements in semiconductors than it says about any value of what that chip does. It's fine to dislike patents, but I don't think this reasoning is sound.
- xoa 6y ago
  >How's this different than ARM? What!? ARM doesn't do any standards essential stuff, they just developed their own ISA. And they have a massive array of options, from their own ready to go cores all the way up to perpetual architecture licenses that someone can do whatever they want with (so long as it's conformant) indefinitely. How is that remotely similar to something like codec or wireless standards? ARM is about as polar opposite from "refuse to license to for chips, try to extract based on patents for the whole device" as it gets. Their entire business is based around licensing to chip makers with nothing to do with the rest of the device. And if they ever tried such a thing, well first of all it wouldn't affect their perpetual licensees at all, and second everyone would just move to RISC-V or whatever. Software patents are all wrong and should be eliminated anyway, IP value there and development incensitves are covered more than sufficiently by copyright. But it's much worse in what are literally monopoly collusion cases in the good sense, aka "standards". Normally even having a patent doesn't give an entity any special privileges against anti-trust there, they have a monopoly on their own patent but they can't seek to force everyone to use it illegally. Standards though are of great value, and while being horizontal monopolies can be very important in preventing vertical monopolies. Plus they're key when dealing with hard and soft natural monopolies, such as utilization of EM spectrum or content formats. But the counter to that is supposed to be that while everyone in the pool gets a fair cut, they also give up their rights of discrimination or exclusivity. Anyone who doesn't do that for a SEP should have the book brought down on them hard.

knuthsat 6y ago

I don't know if I remember this correctly but it sounded to me like these patents are just regurgitation of open source efforts. A bunch of algorithms just stolen from the open source codebases.

seg_lol 6y ago
And bunch of them just alter constants and/or apply filters or convolutions at different steps. One reads this stuff and will continually ask them selves, "this is patentable?' It is if you are at the right place and the right time, which is shame and a sham because then the patent system rewards the corps with the deep pockets that s()it on standards bodies.
- zinekeller 6y ago
  Is it really open-source though? As I looked at the patents, most were filed in the late '90s (don't ask me how the grant were delayed by ~5 years, I also don't know this). The main question is that the techniques discussed in the patents were prior art before 1999? Because chanting "open source" is not really helpful here unless there are code that exists then that matches the patents.
  - toast0 6y ago
    5 year delay before granting isn't terribly unusual based on my experience with the USPTO. It takes about a year for your patent to get to the examiner, then they might have comments or questions, which it takes some time to address, then it tskes some time to get back to the top of the examiner's queue. If they deny, and you appeal, it doesn't take too much to get to 5 years. Of course, there were some games you could play to delay almost forever, read about submarine patents, and US patent rules changed in mid 2000s for patents filed after that date, the patent exclusive use period starts when the patent is filed, not when it's issued. Any patents still pending from before that will have an exclusive use period starting on issuance, if issued.

xoa 6y ago

One question that's been bugging more with regard to these older encumbered standards as we get into the 2020s: does anyone know if there has been an exhaustive search of when they go patent free? H.264 Version 1 was 2003, and Version 3 (which added the high profiles, so it's probably by far the most common by this point) was 2005. So worst-case scenario, we're 3-5 years from any possible patent being expired. But in most cases standards patents have priority dates at least a year or two before, because negotiations happen well before standard official finalization (first draft in this case was sometime in 1999 or 2000 IIRC) and patent holders who try to keep it a secret and apply at the last moment risk getting cut out or having someone else come up with it and neutralize them. I remember a lot of people were watching for when MP3 went patent free, and it'd be interesting if there was a site keeping track of when some of these other still commonly used standards did the same. Patents last relatively way too long in the tech world, but even here it's not forever.

est31 6y ago
https://www.osnews.com/story/24954/us-patent-expiration-for-mp3-mpeg-2-h264/ https://www.osnews.com/story/24954/us-patent-expiration-for-... > H.264 is a newer video codec. The standard first came out in 2003, but continues to evolve. An automatically generated patent expiration list is available at H.264 Patent List based on the MPEG-LA patent list. The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027 ( note that 7835443 is divisional, but the automated program missed that). US 7826532 was first filed in 05 sep 2003 and has an impressive 1546 day extension. It will be a while before H.264 is patent free. The automatically generated list that this quote talks about also lists US 7835443, which expires in 2028...
- hedora 6y ago
  Surely the publication of the standard 17 years ago constitutes public disclosure and/or prior work. Using extensions to increase the working lifespan of a patent to 25 years (as done here, apparently) really shouldn’t be allowed. It’s one thing if the work is under development during filing or something, but we’re talking about an openly published standardized technology. Patent lifespan should be limited to the minimum of 17 years from filing (or maybe grant date), and 17 years from publication/commercialization.

zinekeller 6y ago

I have found that at least one of the patents contested (U.S. Patent No. 6,879,268, formerly filed as 10/054,610) was indeed properly declared by Nokia back in 2002 [1]. 1: https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/04/07/T040700053E0001PDFE.pdf https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/04/07/T040700053E0001P... Edit: I have found other contested patents that were properly declared but I already said quits and let the courts decide on this. Final edit: I gave up reviewing Nokia's declarations after finding matches in the filing. Apparently, the so-called contested patents (at least those that I have checked) were called differently when Nokia submitted the declaration (Lenovo's legal reviewed the patent numbers but did not looked if they matched the filing number). I have looked at some contested patents and it seems that Nokia did declare them properly as far back as 2002, so I genuinely don't know what Lenovo is trying to claim here. Accordingly, I let others complete the review here.

xbar 6y ago
So, Lenovo, who was not party to the standard definition, is looking for a free ride on properly disclosed IP by claiming that the undisclosed IP makes the properly disclosed IP unenforceable. Suck it up and pay, Lenovo.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

Fun fact: there was an attempt by the MPEG working group to design a non-patent-encumbered internet video format. It was killed late in the process by several companies making patent claims on the finished standard, without saying which patents were infringed, therefore making it impossible for the standard to be reworked.

yboris 6y ago
I'm not doubting your story, I'm just curious how is that legally possible? I thought in the US you're innocent until proven guilty.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It's very difficult to preemptively establish that something is not encumbered by a patent, which is what the group releasing the standard would have to do to make the standard adoptable. If someone successfully claims the standard infringes their patent after it is released, it failed to accomplish the goal.
- est31 6y ago
  First, that's a principle of the penal system, not the civil courts which would decide such matters. Second, this didn't involve any legal action at all, and was instead just as a threat, basically saying that if they went forward with the standard, they would sue companies that invested into the standard, but by that point the companies would be in a bad situation as they'd have invested tremendous resources into the codec. The moment you make any kind of non trivial program (say 20k lines and above) you almost guaranteed violate some patent so they were probably even right with their claims.
  - dancodes 6y ago
    If your last statement is true, how come there are companies working on software every day and not getting sued constantly?
    - 6y ago

zoobab 6y ago

FFII is crowdfunding a lawsuit against the UPC, which will enforce software patents in Europe: https://ffii.org/bundestag-vote-for-unitary-software-patents-ffii-call-on-software-companies-to-donate/ https://ffii.org/bundestag-vote-for-unitary-software-patents...

varispeed 6y ago

Sadly patents are mostly used to protect a _discovery_ rather than _invention_. Who finds something first gets the cake and so on. For example when I was playing with digital synthesis, it felt natural for me to modulate the phase within the grain of sample and then I learned it has been patented by Casio. Then recently I read about so called TMT technology, where company essentially patented adding tolerance to components when simulating circuits... I mean d'oh? If you want to do realistic simulation, that's one of the things to take into account, but now that it is patented, good luck. This whole thing needs to be scrapped.

patentatt 6y ago
Just because it ‘felt natural’ doesn’t imply that it’s a discovery rather than invention. Generally in IP the word discovery is in regard to a natural phenomenon, something found in nature. Natural laws are discovered, everything else is invented. So what you describe sounds like an invention rather than a discovery.
- varispeed 6y ago
  I would disagree. For example phase is one of the parameters of the grain, so to modulate the phase how come it an invention, but to modulate a filter cut off is not? The same tolerance is inherent part of analogue component, as it is very difficult to achieve exact value of e.g. capacitance, so components are manufactured with different levels of tolerance, so if you simply acknowledge this fact of life in your simulation how is that an invention?
- ncmncm 6y ago
  At least US has a carve-out for obviousness to people in the field. It has been chipped away at for a long time, so there might not be anything left of it.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    The TMT I was talking about has gone through fairly recently. Please take a look https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170060527A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170060527A1/en It's crazy.

hedora 6y ago

It sounds like some of the patents were granted after standardization was complete. That’s incredibly sketchy. For all we know, they incorporate third party IP that Nokia derived from the standardization process. I imagine Nokia would be hard-pressed to prove this isn’t the case.

ajsnigrutin 6y ago

I understand the need for patents. But the length of patents is absurd. 20 years for each of, what is basically a single piece of a huge puzzle, is absurd. Especially in tech, where most of the things are obsolete way sooner.

silexia 6y ago

Patents are a nightmare for innovation and are used by bullies and criminals to crush improved operations. Patents are simply a money grab. No one should be able to own an idea... They can own their business and compete in the free market. This is how the worst corporations that we all hate stay alive... Patents. Look at Oracle for example.