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I was confused reading the article, seeing your comment makes me at ease that I read the article correctly. I too don’t get why the EU needs to intervene when t

I was confused reading the article, seeing your comment makes me at ease that I read the article correctly. I too don’t get why the EU needs to intervene when they are making things better.

sdoering 4y ago
Because others are loosing money and lobbied enough people to get the antitrust ball rolling. No government serves the people. But especially not the EU. That is always the facade. This is an act of war against free standards. Take German weather reporting for example. The tax financed weather service had a free app with weather warnings and weather forecasts. Without any tracking or advertising. The commercial weather services sued it and where granted the ruling that forecasting of weather data payed by the taxpayers offered for free is forbidden as it hinders the commercial interests of the competition. So either one pays for the app now or just has weather warnings in it. Antitrust for the win (from the POV of the commercial entities).
- mschuster91 4y ago
  The general legal principle that a taxpayer-funded service may not be in direct competition with commercial services is pretty much long-standing EU tradition and not a "war against free standards", see e.g. the requirement for public broadcasters to take down content [1]. The US follows a different tradition, wherein all works created by government employees are in the public duty [2]. Personally, I believe both ways of traditions are reasonable. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...
- dijit 4y ago
  There are some policies that the EU introduce which make some level of sense but have unfortunate consequences. I remember one such case with regards to Estonian air. For those that don't know, estonian air was losing a _lot_ of money, but the Estonian government kept bailing them out. In fact it was considered the "cost of doing business" and took it as a form of investment in tourism. Of course, this is still a private company, and subsidising the airline means that nobody can possibly compete at that price point. So the EU ruling is sound, but the effect is that people are having a lot harder time getting to Estonia now.. which is a net loss for Estonia overall. Saying the EU doesn't serve the people is a bit of a lie, but there are circumstances where the EU does something and a subset of people are worse off, even if it's a better idea.
  - matwood 4y ago
    > estonian air was losing a _lot_ of money, but the Estonian government kept bailing them out Sounds like nearly every airline since airlines started. “The quickest way to become a millionaire in the airline business is to start out as a billionaire.” - Branson
  - sylware 4y ago
    EU is _BIG_... and you have bad apples everywhere popping up all the time which need to be cleanup all the time.
  - pas 4y ago
    the problem was favoring that one company over all the others. Estonia is free to subsidize flights to Estonia, but they should do it through tax rebate or something not through propping up one unprofitable state owned company.
- Someone 4y ago
  > forecasting of weather data payed by the taxpayers offered for free is forbidden That surprises me. The data itself is open (https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/opendata/opendata.html https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/opendata/opendata.html: “According to a change in the Deutscher Wetterdienst Act, which has come into effect on 25.7.17, the DWD has been given the legal mandate to make its weather and climate information available mostly free of charge”), and trivially retrieved from their server, for example from https://opendata.dwd.de/weather/text_forecasts/ https://opendata.dwd.de/weather/text_forecasts/ I don’t remember the URL, but they also have a freely available GIS server that serves weather warnings that is easily used as a layer on top of OSM data. I don’t know the details, but I think the issue is that raw data is free, but writing apps on top of it is left to the market. I don’t see any reason why there can’t be a free open source app that uses this data.
  - nightpool 4y ago
    The problem is not that *nobody* can offer weather apps for free, the problem is that the court has ruled that it is anticompetitive for the German government to offer a free weather app as a public service. You can read more details about the ruling here: https://www.dw.com/en/court-outlaws-german-weather-services-free-weather-app/a-52735502 https://www.dw.com/en/court-outlaws-german-weather-services-... This means that any FOSS or free-as-in-beer weather apps must be funded out of a developer's own pocket, rather than as a public good.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The problems trying to develop a royalty-free video standard at ISO might be instructive here. MPEG floated a standard called IVC (Internet Video Coding) that was specifically designed to only use Option 1[0] patented inventions. After it was published they got a bunch of Option 2[1] declarations that effectively killed the standard. ISO doesn't actually require patent holders to declare what patents are being infringed if they are making an Option 2 offer, so there's no means to actually redesign the spec to not use those patents. I'd like to introduce you to a man named Leonardo Chiariglione - co-founder of MPEG, if not the entire concept of FRAND patent pools. He has a rather long blog post from 2018 detailing ISO's growing patent problems here: https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/ https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... The ending of this story is that Leonardo was fired or forced out about two years ago, and MPEG is dead - or, more accurately, cut into like five different pieces. There's a bunch of patent holders who are angry that patent revenues have fallen since the MPEG-2 days, angry that H.264 has zero-cost licensing for certain industries, and are deliberately trying to break the whole FRAND licensing system with conflicting H.265 patent pools to try and extort more money out of codec implementers. Leonardo tried to make ISO aware of this and several unnamed national entities vetoed him. My conspiratorial guess is that one of those national entities is the EU, or perhaps ECMA[2]; being lobbied on by the same companies that gave us Velos Media and/or Access Advance. Those same people are probably whispering sweet nothings in the EU regulators' ears. "Look, Google is trying to use their market power to not pay for video codec patents![3] Ignore all the other sketchy stuff we're doing on the other end." [0] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to license them on a royalty-free basis [1] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to join a patent pool [2] Can you tell I have limited knowledge of how ISO is organized? [3] Leonardo himself actually also believes this and is arguably more opposed to AOM than the EU regulators are. EDIT: I probably should also include another link to Leonardo's blog: https://blog.chiariglione.org/video-compression-patents-an-obtuse-story/ https://blog.chiariglione.org/video-compression-patents-an-o...

I was confused reading the article, seeing your comment makes me at ease that I read the article correctly. I too don’t get why the EU needs to intervene when they are making things better.

sdoering 4y ago

Because others are loosing money and lobbied enough people to get the antitrust ball rolling. No government serves the people. But especially not the EU. That is always the facade. This is an act of war against free standards. Take German weather reporting for example. The tax financed weather service had a free app with weather warnings and weather forecasts. Without any tracking or advertising. The commercial weather services sued it and where granted the ruling that forecasting of weather data payed by the taxpayers offered for free is forbidden as it hinders the commercial interests of the competition. So either one pays for the app now or just has weather warnings in it. Antitrust for the win (from the POV of the commercial entities).

mschuster91 4y ago
The general legal principle that a taxpayer-funded service may not be in direct competition with commercial services is pretty much long-standing EU tradition and not a "war against free standards", see e.g. the requirement for public broadcasters to take down content [1]. The US follows a different tradition, wherein all works created by government employees are in the public duty [2]. Personally, I believe both ways of traditions are reasonable. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...
dijit 4y ago
There are some policies that the EU introduce which make some level of sense but have unfortunate consequences. I remember one such case with regards to Estonian air. For those that don't know, estonian air was losing a _lot_ of money, but the Estonian government kept bailing them out. In fact it was considered the "cost of doing business" and took it as a form of investment in tourism. Of course, this is still a private company, and subsidising the airline means that nobody can possibly compete at that price point. So the EU ruling is sound, but the effect is that people are having a lot harder time getting to Estonia now.. which is a net loss for Estonia overall. Saying the EU doesn't serve the people is a bit of a lie, but there are circumstances where the EU does something and a subset of people are worse off, even if it's a better idea.
- matwood 4y ago
  > estonian air was losing a _lot_ of money, but the Estonian government kept bailing them out Sounds like nearly every airline since airlines started. “The quickest way to become a millionaire in the airline business is to start out as a billionaire.” - Branson
- sylware 4y ago
  EU is _BIG_... and you have bad apples everywhere popping up all the time which need to be cleanup all the time.
- pas 4y ago
  the problem was favoring that one company over all the others. Estonia is free to subsidize flights to Estonia, but they should do it through tax rebate or something not through propping up one unprofitable state owned company.
Someone 4y ago
> forecasting of weather data payed by the taxpayers offered for free is forbidden That surprises me. The data itself is open (https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/opendata/opendata.html https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/opendata/opendata.html: “According to a change in the Deutscher Wetterdienst Act, which has come into effect on 25.7.17, the DWD has been given the legal mandate to make its weather and climate information available mostly free of charge”), and trivially retrieved from their server, for example from https://opendata.dwd.de/weather/text_forecasts/ https://opendata.dwd.de/weather/text_forecasts/ I don’t remember the URL, but they also have a freely available GIS server that serves weather warnings that is easily used as a layer on top of OSM data. I don’t know the details, but I think the issue is that raw data is free, but writing apps on top of it is left to the market. I don’t see any reason why there can’t be a free open source app that uses this data.
- nightpool 4y ago
  The problem is not that *nobody* can offer weather apps for free, the problem is that the court has ruled that it is anticompetitive for the German government to offer a free weather app as a public service. You can read more details about the ruling here: https://www.dw.com/en/court-outlaws-german-weather-services-free-weather-app/a-52735502 https://www.dw.com/en/court-outlaws-german-weather-services-... This means that any FOSS or free-as-in-beer weather apps must be funded out of a developer's own pocket, rather than as a public good.

kmeisthax 4y ago

The problems trying to develop a royalty-free video standard at ISO might be instructive here. MPEG floated a standard called IVC (Internet Video Coding) that was specifically designed to only use Option 1[0] patented inventions. After it was published they got a bunch of Option 2[1] declarations that effectively killed the standard. ISO doesn't actually require patent holders to declare what patents are being infringed if they are making an Option 2 offer, so there's no means to actually redesign the spec to not use those patents. I'd like to introduce you to a man named Leonardo Chiariglione - co-founder of MPEG, if not the entire concept of FRAND patent pools. He has a rather long blog post from 2018 detailing ISO's growing patent problems here: https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/ https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... The ending of this story is that Leonardo was fired or forced out about two years ago, and MPEG is dead - or, more accurately, cut into like five different pieces. There's a bunch of patent holders who are angry that patent revenues have fallen since the MPEG-2 days, angry that H.264 has zero-cost licensing for certain industries, and are deliberately trying to break the whole FRAND licensing system with conflicting H.265 patent pools to try and extort more money out of codec implementers. Leonardo tried to make ISO aware of this and several unnamed national entities vetoed him. My conspiratorial guess is that one of those national entities is the EU, or perhaps ECMA[2]; being lobbied on by the same companies that gave us Velos Media and/or Access Advance. Those same people are probably whispering sweet nothings in the EU regulators' ears. "Look, Google is trying to use their market power to not pay for video codec patents![3] Ignore all the other sketchy stuff we're doing on the other end." [0] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to license them on a royalty-free basis [1] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to join a patent pool [2] Can you tell I have limited knowledge of how ISO is organized? [3] Leonardo himself actually also believes this and is arguably more opposed to AOM than the EU regulators are. EDIT: I probably should also include another link to Leonardo's blog: https://blog.chiariglione.org/video-compression-patents-an-obtuse-story/ https://blog.chiariglione.org/video-compression-patents-an-o...