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The public interest is that interoperability standards should not require patented technology at all to implement. The point of an interoperability standard is

by 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.

by dzdt 6y ago

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.