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IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes codec development expensive. In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult, because mos

by pornel 1y ago

IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes codec development expensive. In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult, because most computers weren't capable of encoding video, and the field was in its infancy. However, by the end of '00s computers were fast enough for anybody to do video encoding R&D, and there was a ton of research to build upon. At that point MPEG's role changed from being a pioneer in the field to being an incumbent with a patent minefield, stopping others from moving the field forward.

mike_hearn 1y ago
IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents. The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocumented and heavily obfuscated, relying on tamper-proofed ASICs much faster.
- badsectoracula 1y ago
  That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    Without IP protections that allow copyleft to exist arguably there would be no FOSS. When anything you publish can be leveraged and expropriated by Microsoft et al. without them being obligated to contribute back or even credit you, you are just an unpaid ghost engineer for big tech.
    - immibis 1y ago
      I thought your argument was that Microsoft wouldn't be able to exist in that world. Which is it?
      - strogonoff 1y ago
        Why would it not be able to exist?
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    Software wasn't always covered by copyright, and people wrote it all the same. In fact they even sold it, just built-to-order as opposed to any kind of retail mass market. (Technically, there was no mass market for computers back then so that goes without saying.)
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    This is still the argument for software copyright. And I think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little successful consumer software. Outside of browsers, Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google Docs, or Photoshop. The browsers are an interesting case. Neither Chrome nor Edge are really open source, despite Chromium being so, and they are both funded by advertising and marketing money from huge corporations. Safari is of course closed source. And Firefox is an increasingly tiny runner-up. So I don't know if I'd really count Chromium as a FLOSS success story. Overall, I don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for. What has generally happened is that companies building software have realized that there is a lot of value to be found in treating FLOSS software as a kind of barter agreement between companies, where maybe Microsoft helps improve Linux for the benefit of all, but in turn it gets to use, say, Google's efforts on Chromium, and so on. The fact that other companies then get to mooch off of these big collaborations doesn't really matter compared to getting rid of the hassle of actually setting up explicit agreements with so many others.
    - _alternator_ 1y ago
      The value of OSS is estimated at about $9 trillion dollars. That’s more valuable than any company on earth. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        Sure. Almost all of it supported by companies who sell software, hardware, or ads.
    - sitkack 1y ago
      > don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for The entire internet, end to end, runs on FLOSS.
      - 1y ago
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    That argument seems to have been proven basically correct, given that a ton of open source development happens only because companies with deep pockets pay for the developers' time. Which makes perfect sense - no matter how altruistic a person is, they have to pay rent and buy food just like everyone else, and a lot of people aren't going to have time/energy to develop software for free after they get home from their 9-5.
- sitkack 1y ago
  You continue to make the same unsubstantiated claims about codecs being hard and expensive. These same tropes were said about every other field, and even if true, we have tens of thousands of folks that would like to participate, but are locked out due to broken IP law. The firewall of patents exist precisely because digital video is a way to shakedown the route media would have to travel to get to the end user. Codecs are not, "harder than" compilers, yet the field of compilers was blown completely open by GCC. Capital didn't see the market opportunity because there wasn't the same possibility of being a gatekeeper for so much attention and money. The patents aren't because it is difficult, the patents are there because they can extract money from the revenue streams.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    Codecs not harder than compilers? Sounds like an unsubstantiated claim! Modern video codecs are harder than compilers. You have to have good ASIC development expertise to do them right, for example, which you don't need for compilers. It's totally feasible for a single company to develop a leading edge compiler whereas you don't see that in video codecs, historically they've been collaborations.
    - pornel 1y ago
      (I've worked on both codecs and compilers. You may be underestimating the difficulty of implementing sound optimizers). Hardware vendors don't benefit from the patent pools. They usually get nothing from them, and are burdened by having to pass per-unit licensing costs on to their customers. It's true that designing an ASIC-friendly codec needs special considerations, and benefits from close collaboration with hardware vendors, but it's not magic. The general constraints are well-known to codec designers (in open-source too). The commercial incentives for collaboration are already there — HW vendors will profit from selling the chipsets or licensing the HW design. The patent situation is completely broken. The commercial codecs "invent" coding features of dubious utility, mostly unnecessary tweaks on old stuff, because everyone wants to have their patent in the pool. It ends up being a political game, because the engineering goal is to make the simplest most effective codec, but the financial incentive is to approve everyone's patented add-ons regardless of whether they're worth the complexity or not. Meanwhile everything that isn't explicitly covered by a patent needs to be proven to be 20 years old, and this limits MPEG too. Otherwise nobody can prove that there won't be any submarine patent that could be used to set up a competing patent pool and extort MPEG's customers. So our latest-and-greatest codecs are built on 20-year-old ideas, with or without some bells and whistles added. The ASICs often don't use the bells and whistles anyway, because the extra coding features may not even be suitable for ASICs, and usually have diminishing returns (like 3x slower encode for 1% better quality/filesize ratio).
cornholio 1y ago
That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties. The incentive being that you will be left out of the pool, the other members will work around your patents while not licensing their own patents to you, so your own IP is now worthless since you can't work around theirs. As long as IP law continues in the same form, the alternative to that is completely closed agreements among major companies that will push their own proprietary formats and aggressively enforce their patents. The fair world where everyone is free to create a new thing, improve upon the frontier codecs, and get a fair reward for their efforts, is simply a fantasy without patent law reform. In the current geopolitical climate, it's very very unlikely for nations where these developments traditionally happened, such as US and western Europe, to weaken their IP laws.
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  They actually messed up the basic concept of a patent pool, and that is the key to their failure. They didn't get people to agree on terms up front, they made the final codec with interlocking patents embedded from hundreds of parties and made no attempt to avoid random outsider's patents and then once it was done tried to come to a licence agreement when every minor patent holder had an effective veto on the resulting pool. That's how you end up with multiple pools plus people who own patents and aren't members of any of the pools. It's ridiculous. My minor conspiracy theory is that if you did it right, then you'd basically end up with something close to open source codecs as that's the best overall outcome. Everyone benefits from only putting in freely available ideas. So if you want to gouge people with your patents you need to mess this up and "accidentally" create a patent mess.
- scotty79 1y ago
  Patent pools exist to make infeasible system look not so infeasible so people won't recoginize how it's stifling innovation and abolish it.
- phkahler 1y ago
  >> That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties. You can say that, but this discussion is in response to the guy who started MPEG and later shut it down. I don't think he'd say its harsh.

by pornel 1y ago

mike_hearn 1y ago

IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents. The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocumented and heavily obfuscated, relying on tamper-proofed ASICs much faster.

badsectoracula 1y ago
That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  Without IP protections that allow copyleft to exist arguably there would be no FOSS. When anything you publish can be leveraged and expropriated by Microsoft et al. without them being obligated to contribute back or even credit you, you are just an unpaid ghost engineer for big tech.
  - immibis 1y ago
    I thought your argument was that Microsoft wouldn't be able to exist in that world. Which is it?
    - strogonoff 1y ago
      Why would it not be able to exist?
- zozbot234 1y ago
  Software wasn't always covered by copyright, and people wrote it all the same. In fact they even sold it, just built-to-order as opposed to any kind of retail mass market. (Technically, there was no mass market for computers back then so that goes without saying.)
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  This is still the argument for software copyright. And I think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little successful consumer software. Outside of browsers, Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google Docs, or Photoshop. The browsers are an interesting case. Neither Chrome nor Edge are really open source, despite Chromium being so, and they are both funded by advertising and marketing money from huge corporations. Safari is of course closed source. And Firefox is an increasingly tiny runner-up. So I don't know if I'd really count Chromium as a FLOSS success story. Overall, I don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for. What has generally happened is that companies building software have realized that there is a lot of value to be found in treating FLOSS software as a kind of barter agreement between companies, where maybe Microsoft helps improve Linux for the benefit of all, but in turn it gets to use, say, Google's efforts on Chromium, and so on. The fact that other companies then get to mooch off of these big collaborations doesn't really matter compared to getting rid of the hassle of actually setting up explicit agreements with so many others.
  - _alternator_ 1y ago
    The value of OSS is estimated at about $9 trillion dollars. That’s more valuable than any company on earth. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      Sure. Almost all of it supported by companies who sell software, hardware, or ads.
  - sitkack 1y ago
    > don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for The entire internet, end to end, runs on FLOSS.
    - 1y ago
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  That argument seems to have been proven basically correct, given that a ton of open source development happens only because companies with deep pockets pay for the developers' time. Which makes perfect sense - no matter how altruistic a person is, they have to pay rent and buy food just like everyone else, and a lot of people aren't going to have time/energy to develop software for free after they get home from their 9-5.
sitkack 1y ago
You continue to make the same unsubstantiated claims about codecs being hard and expensive. These same tropes were said about every other field, and even if true, we have tens of thousands of folks that would like to participate, but are locked out due to broken IP law. The firewall of patents exist precisely because digital video is a way to shakedown the route media would have to travel to get to the end user. Codecs are not, "harder than" compilers, yet the field of compilers was blown completely open by GCC. Capital didn't see the market opportunity because there wasn't the same possibility of being a gatekeeper for so much attention and money. The patents aren't because it is difficult, the patents are there because they can extract money from the revenue streams.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Codecs not harder than compilers? Sounds like an unsubstantiated claim! Modern video codecs are harder than compilers. You have to have good ASIC development expertise to do them right, for example, which you don't need for compilers. It's totally feasible for a single company to develop a leading edge compiler whereas you don't see that in video codecs, historically they've been collaborations.
  - pornel 1y ago
    (I've worked on both codecs and compilers. You may be underestimating the difficulty of implementing sound optimizers). Hardware vendors don't benefit from the patent pools. They usually get nothing from them, and are burdened by having to pass per-unit licensing costs on to their customers. It's true that designing an ASIC-friendly codec needs special considerations, and benefits from close collaboration with hardware vendors, but it's not magic. The general constraints are well-known to codec designers (in open-source too). The commercial incentives for collaboration are already there — HW vendors will profit from selling the chipsets or licensing the HW design. The patent situation is completely broken. The commercial codecs "invent" coding features of dubious utility, mostly unnecessary tweaks on old stuff, because everyone wants to have their patent in the pool. It ends up being a political game, because the engineering goal is to make the simplest most effective codec, but the financial incentive is to approve everyone's patented add-ons regardless of whether they're worth the complexity or not. Meanwhile everything that isn't explicitly covered by a patent needs to be proven to be 20 years old, and this limits MPEG too. Otherwise nobody can prove that there won't be any submarine patent that could be used to set up a competing patent pool and extort MPEG's customers. So our latest-and-greatest codecs are built on 20-year-old ideas, with or without some bells and whistles added. The ASICs often don't use the bells and whistles anyway, because the extra coding features may not even be suitable for ASICs, and usually have diminishing returns (like 3x slower encode for 1% better quality/filesize ratio).

cornholio 1y ago

That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties. The incentive being that you will be left out of the pool, the other members will work around your patents while not licensing their own patents to you, so your own IP is now worthless since you can't work around theirs. As long as IP law continues in the same form, the alternative to that is completely closed agreements among major companies that will push their own proprietary formats and aggressively enforce their patents. The fair world where everyone is free to create a new thing, improve upon the frontier codecs, and get a fair reward for their efforts, is simply a fantasy without patent law reform. In the current geopolitical climate, it's very very unlikely for nations where these developments traditionally happened, such as US and western Europe, to weaken their IP laws.

ZeroGravitas 1y ago
They actually messed up the basic concept of a patent pool, and that is the key to their failure. They didn't get people to agree on terms up front, they made the final codec with interlocking patents embedded from hundreds of parties and made no attempt to avoid random outsider's patents and then once it was done tried to come to a licence agreement when every minor patent holder had an effective veto on the resulting pool. That's how you end up with multiple pools plus people who own patents and aren't members of any of the pools. It's ridiculous. My minor conspiracy theory is that if you did it right, then you'd basically end up with something close to open source codecs as that's the best overall outcome. Everyone benefits from only putting in freely available ideas. So if you want to gouge people with your patents you need to mess this up and "accidentally" create a patent mess.
scotty79 1y ago
Patent pools exist to make infeasible system look not so infeasible so people won't recoginize how it's stifling innovation and abolish it.
phkahler 1y ago
>> That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties. You can say that, but this discussion is in response to the guy who started MPEG and later shut it down. I don't think he'd say its harsh.