6 ms·

These are standard business practices. They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP". People throw a tantrum because money. Instead

by all2 10mo ago

These are standard business practices. They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP". People throw a tantrum because money. Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free. I understand the ideas behind open source, and I think they are excellent. But I also understand that people and the businesses they operate want to make money.

softfalcon 10mo ago
When I'm in these situations, I try and put myself into the IP holder's shoes. "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" I think the answer is probably no for most people. Because most of us are not the IP holder, they think this technology should just be free (as you stated earlier). This lack of empathy and care for others (even IP holders) is largely why these draconian IP rules and contracts exist. It's why there are whole crazy NDAs around the HDMI spec. It's because every time someone is given even a slight look under the covers, they try and steal it, because it's worth a lot of money. This is a nuanced variant of "this is why we can't have nice things" all over again.
- archagon 10mo ago
  The idea that you can “steal” knowledge and ideas is farcical. One reason why China is so good at iterating rapidly on technology is that this notion of intellectual “property” doesn’t really exist there. Any cool new invention is immediately iterated on by a hundred different makers. And the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
  - reactordev 10mo ago
    It’s the same entitlement that determined one could just download all the content available online to train your models against.
    - archagon 10mo ago
      Weird to call it entitlement when the natural state of information is to be free. What's entitled is asking the government to enforce arbitrary restrictions on other people making use of some information that you somehow intangibly "own." (Of course, it's fucked up that corporations can siphon up all this content and then try to twist the law to carve out an exception for their extra special use case. Information still isn't free unless you're an AI company, I guess.)
    - kmeisthax 10mo ago
      There's a difference between "infringing IP[1]", "stealing IP", and whatever we should call AI training. And it turns out the worse the behavior gets, the less likely the law is going to recognize it as bad. IP infringement is what we're used to talking about. This is when I go and give a stranger a copy of some music I don't own. Or when some sketchy ass guy resells IPTV services to an entire island in Greece or whatever. They're not saying it's their work, they're just refusing to pay the appropriate licensing fee for it. And sometimes we might even agree that a license fee shouldn't have to be paid. What the Linux video driver people want is for the HDMI people to say "yes, you can tell people how to light up this video card in such a way that it successfully negotiates a connection at HDMI 2.1 bitrates", which shouldn't even be infringement at all, but here we are. What China does is wholesale IP theft. They don't just make their own version of someone else's thing, or just do industrial espionage, they actively make an attempt to deny the original creator of their own work. This can include things like forcing foreign entities to go through a JV, or playing games with trademark law to allow domestic companies to actually take legal ownership over foreign works. This is why a lot of American companies spent time and money carrying water for Xi Jinping, despite it going against everything they claimed to stand for. AI training doesn't fit in either mold. It's more like rugpulling human labor by turning know-how and creativity into ownable capital distinct from that of traditional copyright and patents. Copyright gives you ownership over your own work, but says nothing about having your entire craft being automated away by a robot that can turn your work into legally distinct knockoffs of it[0]. So we have an entirely new form of enclosure of the commons, where if you ever do a thing, someone else can turn that thing into their own property that everyone else can pay to rent. Like, to be clear: AI is not Napster. AI is the opposite of Napster. AI is the apotheosis of "you will own nothing and be happy". [0] The only way that copyright claims on AI even sort of fit into recognizable harms is the fact that at some point a Facebook engineer pointed LLaMA's crawler at a torrent site. In fact, I kinda hate how this is sort of saying "well actually fair use only applies if you bought the book first". Which is a problem, because the condition of sale can be "don't make a fair use of it", and the only way to avoid that was to pirate the work and then make your fair use. [1] As Cory Doctorow said, paraphrasing: Intellectual property is the laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors.
  - transcriptase 10mo ago
    China quite literally and unambiguously stole trillions of dollars in IP, trade secrets, and data from research labs in the West by explicitly and systematically embedding spies, hacking, and blackmailing/threatening employees/students wherever economically beneficial information existed for nearly 20 years. And this is on top of the practice of CCP sanctioned theft from and screwing over of nearly every company that outsourced manufacturing there from 1990 onward. The fact that they finally have enough domestic knowledge to actually innovate as a result of that isn’t some testament to what you think it is. If someone spends a billion dollars researching some new technology and you have someone exfiltrate the blueprints, improve on it slightly, and then undercut who you stole from in the market because you had no investment to recoup… you’re not some enlightened morally righteous free thinker. You’re just a parasite.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - hparadiz 10mo ago
      US did the same in the 19th century with Europe and it's part of how the country bootstrapped it's industrial revolution. https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_theft_is_what_once_helped_make_america_great_103367.html https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_thef...
    - komali2 10mo ago
      > You’re just a parasite. No. It's parasitic to horde human knowledge and seek rent for it. If one is obsessed with the idea of maximizing profit above all other considerations including one's brotherhood to man, there's still other ways to do it that don't involve hoarding knowledge. You are morally righteous to liberate human knowledge, it just annoys rent seekers. Honestly, annoying rent seekers should just be an immediate marker that whatever you're doing is probably ethical.
- shkkmo 10mo ago
  The HDMI Forum isn't "most people", it's a non-profit run by some of the largest companies in the space that self describes this way.[1] I think it is reasonable to complain when "someone" is being so hypocritical and arguably engaging in anti-competitive practices. How do the crazy NDAs in any way server the self stated mission of the forum? > [1] https://hdmiforum.org/about/ https://hdmiforum.org/about/ Chartered as a nonprofit, mutual benefit corporation, the mission of the HDMI Forum is to: Create and develop new versions of the HDMI Specification and the Compliance Test Specification, incorporating new and improved functionality Encourage and promote the adoption and widespread use of its Specifications worldwide Support an ecosystem of fully interoperable HDMI-enabled products Provide an open and non-discriminatory licensing program with respect to its Specifications
- dwattttt 10mo ago
  > "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard.
  - andybak 10mo ago
    Devil's Advocate time. Would the result of that be better or worse quality public standards? (I don't actually know what I think off the cuff - but it's the obvious follow on question to your statement and I don't think your statement can stand on it's own without a well argued counter)
    - dwattttt 10mo ago
      It's a fine question. I think the onus is on public regulatory bodies responsible for the standards; if they aren't able to pay for the work to be published as an open standard, it wasn't worth the cost.
      - rcxdude 10mo ago
        Standards also benefit the industry as a whole, and it's generally in the interests of the companies involves to participate in the standardisation process anyway. Charging for the description of them is just a cherry on top (compared to e.g. licensing any relevant patents), I don't believe it's at all required to incentivize a standardization process. (this is of course looking at interoperation standards - regulatory bodies are going to be more concerned with e.g. safety standards)
  - throw0101a 10mo ago
    > This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard. Define "public standard". And how is HDMI one of them? HDMI is a private bundle of IP that the license holders are free to give (or not give) to anyone. We're not talking about a statue by a government 'of the people' what should be public. No one is mandated by any government to implement it AFAICT: and even if it was, it would be up to the government to make sure they only reference publicly available documents in laws.
- rpdillon 10mo ago
  > "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" Only if you want people to use it. Developing a protocol is an investment in defining the direction a technology follows; the benefits are not best accrued by charging for access to the standard, but rather by leveraging the ability to direct the trend. The alternative is that the licensing charge causes a bunch of stupid friction and prevents the standard from being truly universal. EDIT: Implementing a standard is enough work, paying for the privilege to do so is often a non-starter.
AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
> They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP". The general premise of patents and copyrights is that you're going to do some development work and then you get an exclusive right that yields a competitive advantage. Standards are different. The purpose of the standard is that Alice wants her output device to be compatible with everyone else's input device and Bob wants his input device to be compatible with everyone else's output device. There is no competitive advantage to be had because the very premise is that everyone possible is going to implement it to maximize the network effect. And the entire industry has the incentive to want the standard to be good and put whatever good ideas they have into it because they're all stuck with it if it isn't. Meanwhile because of the network effect, everyone has to implement the standard because if they come up with their own thing -- even if it's better -- it wouldn't be compatible. So all of the normal incentives from copyrights and patents are wrong. You can't gain a competitive advantage from it, companies have a preexisting incentive to make it good even without an exclusive right, and someone who doesn't want to pay doesn't have the option to try to do better on their own because of the network effect. And the network effect makes it an antitrust concern. The result is that NDAs and royalties on standards are just a shakedown and the law shouldn't allow them.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- parineum 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - regularfry 10mo ago
    Like the IETF, you mean? If I want to implement general internet-compatible timestamps, RFC3339 is right here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339. How about something big: TCP? RFC9293. It's here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293. HTML? Different organisation but the same idea, it's over here: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ You're reading this web page because of standards organisations that gave everything away for free for anyone to implement.
observationist 10mo ago
Yes, and we should say "no more making money from stupid things like secret technical standards" Copyright and patent protection is afforded under the principle that said protections grant concurrent value to the people as is granted to the holder of the rights. Stuff like HDMI specs gatekeeping simply allows a select group of people to exploit licensing and seek rent. It doesn't provide any benefit to the people of the US whatsoever, and the fundamental principle by which the rights were granted is violated. Copyright and patent protection is intended to incentivize and reward creativity, not to allow conglomerates of IP hoarders and patent trolls to exploit legal gotchas, to allow endless rent seeking, or empower megacorps to mass file endless vague patents so as to provide endless legal challenges to small competitors. Copyright and patent law as currently implemented and practiced are fundamentally broken and far diverged from any principled, meaningful benefit to the people. There are what, 2 publishers now? Five nines of commercially viable patents go to megacorps and universities? Seven nines of all music and media belong to conglomerates of one sort or another? Something like that. I understand the intent of the original implementations of copyright, and maybe the laws even made sense for a few years, but either they were corrupt from the start, or they were so badly written that they never had a shot at achieving any sort of meaningful ROI for the price paid by the public.
shmerl 10mo ago
Anti competitive "standard business practices" should be counteracted with good enough competition law that forbids them. As simple as that. So I totally agree with the above comment. They simply shouldn't be able to prevent open implementations.
gethly 10mo ago
you are confusing standards with patents.
themafia 10mo ago
> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free. This would only make sense if there _wasn't_ free video standards competing with HDMI. How is it that one group managed to do this for free yet the other group charges clearly exorbitant rates for a nearly equivalent product. > They own IP. That isn't nearly as valuable as they say it is. They only do this to prevent piracy and not to promote any useful technical standard. > People want to use that IP. People are _forced_ to because the same group practically gives away their technology under certain conditions so their connectors get added to nearly every extant device. I don't _want_ to use HDMI. I'm simply _forced_ to through market manipulation. > want to make money. Selling drugs would earn them more money. Why don't we tolerate that? It could be, under some torturous logic, be just another "standard business practice." In fact looking at our laws I see tons of "standard business practices" that are now flatly illegal. The law is a tool. It can be changed. It should be changed. The citizens pay for 85% of it and while businesses only pay 7%. Why do their "standard practices" hold a candle to the "needs of the citizens."
- wildzzz 10mo ago
  It all stems from the companies behind the HDMI authority. It's basically all of the major AV device makers circa early 2000s. They wrote the spec and added it to all of their products. Displayport wasn't around just yet so HDMI just beat it to market. Since everyone needed an HDMI thing to go with their HDMI thing, everyone else jumped on the HDMI bandwagon. Although I'm really not sure how HDMI managed to get it's way into PCs. Displayport should have just cornered the entire market, it's very popular on business-class machines. I'm guessing it's because of HTPCs and people wanting to put big TVs on their PCs is what led to the adoption.
  - larusso 10mo ago
    I think the HDMI connectors popped up at the same time screens switched from 16:10 (VESA compatible at the time) to 16:9 to be more cost effective for the manufacturers. But I’m not sure why. I looked at graphicscards and wondered why HDMI suddenly gained traction in the PC space even after the release of DisplayPort. I think this should never have happened.
perching_aix 10mo ago
"Hard work" is the worst way to make money at scale, so that argument rings more than just a little hollow, especially when defending access control based moneymaking.
johncolanduoni 10mo ago
How much money could PCI SIG possibly be making for the rightsholders with those fees? They’re not charged to members, they’re not per-seat (so each company only needs to pay once even if they have 100 engineers that need to read it), and they don’t include patent licenses for shipping actual hardware. Nobody’s business model is threatened even slightly by making the standards public. And as we saw with AV1 vs H.265, the IP encumbrance of multiparty standards can create barriers that kill their adoption and the corresponding ability for rightsholders to make money off them. It looks like that family of encodings is going to die off, with basically zero interest from anybody in licensing H.266 when you’ll be able to build AV2 software and hardware for free.
nottorp 10mo ago
> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free. Are you sure that's what's in play here? I don't think anyone gives a shit about using HDMI. They want video and audio to work on their TV. Now tell me how many TVs with non-HDMI ports are out there, and tell me with a straight face that it isn't due to pressure from the "consortium". Edit: by the way the video signaling was identical between DVI and HDMI in the beginning. So whose hard work was it?

by all2 10mo ago

softfalcon 10mo ago

When I'm in these situations, I try and put myself into the IP holder's shoes. "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" I think the answer is probably no for most people. Because most of us are not the IP holder, they think this technology should just be free (as you stated earlier). This lack of empathy and care for others (even IP holders) is largely why these draconian IP rules and contracts exist. It's why there are whole crazy NDAs around the HDMI spec. It's because every time someone is given even a slight look under the covers, they try and steal it, because it's worth a lot of money. This is a nuanced variant of "this is why we can't have nice things" all over again.

archagon 10mo ago
The idea that you can “steal” knowledge and ideas is farcical. One reason why China is so good at iterating rapidly on technology is that this notion of intellectual “property” doesn’t really exist there. Any cool new invention is immediately iterated on by a hundred different makers. And the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
- reactordev 10mo ago
  It’s the same entitlement that determined one could just download all the content available online to train your models against.
  - archagon 10mo ago
    Weird to call it entitlement when the natural state of information is to be free. What's entitled is asking the government to enforce arbitrary restrictions on other people making use of some information that you somehow intangibly "own." (Of course, it's fucked up that corporations can siphon up all this content and then try to twist the law to carve out an exception for their extra special use case. Information still isn't free unless you're an AI company, I guess.)
  - kmeisthax 10mo ago
    There's a difference between "infringing IP[1]", "stealing IP", and whatever we should call AI training. And it turns out the worse the behavior gets, the less likely the law is going to recognize it as bad. IP infringement is what we're used to talking about. This is when I go and give a stranger a copy of some music I don't own. Or when some sketchy ass guy resells IPTV services to an entire island in Greece or whatever. They're not saying it's their work, they're just refusing to pay the appropriate licensing fee for it. And sometimes we might even agree that a license fee shouldn't have to be paid. What the Linux video driver people want is for the HDMI people to say "yes, you can tell people how to light up this video card in such a way that it successfully negotiates a connection at HDMI 2.1 bitrates", which shouldn't even be infringement at all, but here we are. What China does is wholesale IP theft. They don't just make their own version of someone else's thing, or just do industrial espionage, they actively make an attempt to deny the original creator of their own work. This can include things like forcing foreign entities to go through a JV, or playing games with trademark law to allow domestic companies to actually take legal ownership over foreign works. This is why a lot of American companies spent time and money carrying water for Xi Jinping, despite it going against everything they claimed to stand for. AI training doesn't fit in either mold. It's more like rugpulling human labor by turning know-how and creativity into ownable capital distinct from that of traditional copyright and patents. Copyright gives you ownership over your own work, but says nothing about having your entire craft being automated away by a robot that can turn your work into legally distinct knockoffs of it[0]. So we have an entirely new form of enclosure of the commons, where if you ever do a thing, someone else can turn that thing into their own property that everyone else can pay to rent. Like, to be clear: AI is not Napster. AI is the opposite of Napster. AI is the apotheosis of "you will own nothing and be happy". [0] The only way that copyright claims on AI even sort of fit into recognizable harms is the fact that at some point a Facebook engineer pointed LLaMA's crawler at a torrent site. In fact, I kinda hate how this is sort of saying "well actually fair use only applies if you bought the book first". Which is a problem, because the condition of sale can be "don't make a fair use of it", and the only way to avoid that was to pirate the work and then make your fair use. [1] As Cory Doctorow said, paraphrasing: Intellectual property is the laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors.
- transcriptase 10mo ago
  China quite literally and unambiguously stole trillions of dollars in IP, trade secrets, and data from research labs in the West by explicitly and systematically embedding spies, hacking, and blackmailing/threatening employees/students wherever economically beneficial information existed for nearly 20 years. And this is on top of the practice of CCP sanctioned theft from and screwing over of nearly every company that outsourced manufacturing there from 1990 onward. The fact that they finally have enough domestic knowledge to actually innovate as a result of that isn’t some testament to what you think it is. If someone spends a billion dollars researching some new technology and you have someone exfiltrate the blueprints, improve on it slightly, and then undercut who you stole from in the market because you had no investment to recoup… you’re not some enlightened morally righteous free thinker. You’re just a parasite.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hparadiz 10mo ago
    US did the same in the 19th century with Europe and it's part of how the country bootstrapped it's industrial revolution. https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_theft_is_what_once_helped_make_america_great_103367.html https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_thef...
  - komali2 10mo ago
    > You’re just a parasite. No. It's parasitic to horde human knowledge and seek rent for it. If one is obsessed with the idea of maximizing profit above all other considerations including one's brotherhood to man, there's still other ways to do it that don't involve hoarding knowledge. You are morally righteous to liberate human knowledge, it just annoys rent seekers. Honestly, annoying rent seekers should just be an immediate marker that whatever you're doing is probably ethical.
shkkmo 10mo ago
The HDMI Forum isn't "most people", it's a non-profit run by some of the largest companies in the space that self describes this way.[1] I think it is reasonable to complain when "someone" is being so hypocritical and arguably engaging in anti-competitive practices. How do the crazy NDAs in any way server the self stated mission of the forum? > [1] https://hdmiforum.org/about/ https://hdmiforum.org/about/ Chartered as a nonprofit, mutual benefit corporation, the mission of the HDMI Forum is to: Create and develop new versions of the HDMI Specification and the Compliance Test Specification, incorporating new and improved functionality Encourage and promote the adoption and widespread use of its Specifications worldwide Support an ecosystem of fully interoperable HDMI-enabled products Provide an open and non-discriminatory licensing program with respect to its Specifications
dwattttt 10mo ago
> "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard.
- andybak 10mo ago
  Devil's Advocate time. Would the result of that be better or worse quality public standards? (I don't actually know what I think off the cuff - but it's the obvious follow on question to your statement and I don't think your statement can stand on it's own without a well argued counter)
  - dwattttt 10mo ago
    It's a fine question. I think the onus is on public regulatory bodies responsible for the standards; if they aren't able to pay for the work to be published as an open standard, it wasn't worth the cost.
    - rcxdude 10mo ago
      Standards also benefit the industry as a whole, and it's generally in the interests of the companies involves to participate in the standardisation process anyway. Charging for the description of them is just a cherry on top (compared to e.g. licensing any relevant patents), I don't believe it's at all required to incentivize a standardization process. (this is of course looking at interoperation standards - regulatory bodies are going to be more concerned with e.g. safety standards)
- throw0101a 10mo ago
  > This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard. Define "public standard". And how is HDMI one of them? HDMI is a private bundle of IP that the license holders are free to give (or not give) to anyone. We're not talking about a statue by a government 'of the people' what should be public. No one is mandated by any government to implement it AFAICT: and even if it was, it would be up to the government to make sure they only reference publicly available documents in laws.
rpdillon 10mo ago
> "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" Only if you want people to use it. Developing a protocol is an investment in defining the direction a technology follows; the benefits are not best accrued by charging for access to the standard, but rather by leveraging the ability to direct the trend. The alternative is that the licensing charge causes a bunch of stupid friction and prevents the standard from being truly universal. EDIT: Implementing a standard is enough work, paying for the privilege to do so is often a non-starter.

AnthonyMouse 10mo ago

> They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP". The general premise of patents and copyrights is that you're going to do some development work and then you get an exclusive right that yields a competitive advantage. Standards are different. The purpose of the standard is that Alice wants her output device to be compatible with everyone else's input device and Bob wants his input device to be compatible with everyone else's output device. There is no competitive advantage to be had because the very premise is that everyone possible is going to implement it to maximize the network effect. And the entire industry has the incentive to want the standard to be good and put whatever good ideas they have into it because they're all stuck with it if it isn't. Meanwhile because of the network effect, everyone has to implement the standard because if they come up with their own thing -- even if it's better -- it wouldn't be compatible. So all of the normal incentives from copyrights and patents are wrong. You can't gain a competitive advantage from it, companies have a preexisting incentive to make it good even without an exclusive right, and someone who doesn't want to pay doesn't have the option to try to do better on their own because of the network effect. And the network effect makes it an antitrust concern. The result is that NDAs and royalties on standards are just a shakedown and the law shouldn't allow them.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
parineum 10mo ago
[flagged]
- regularfry 10mo ago
  Like the IETF, you mean? If I want to implement general internet-compatible timestamps, RFC3339 is right here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339. How about something big: TCP? RFC9293. It's here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293. HTML? Different organisation but the same idea, it's over here: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ You're reading this web page because of standards organisations that gave everything away for free for anyone to implement.

observationist 10mo ago

Yes, and we should say "no more making money from stupid things like secret technical standards" Copyright and patent protection is afforded under the principle that said protections grant concurrent value to the people as is granted to the holder of the rights. Stuff like HDMI specs gatekeeping simply allows a select group of people to exploit licensing and seek rent. It doesn't provide any benefit to the people of the US whatsoever, and the fundamental principle by which the rights were granted is violated. Copyright and patent protection is intended to incentivize and reward creativity, not to allow conglomerates of IP hoarders and patent trolls to exploit legal gotchas, to allow endless rent seeking, or empower megacorps to mass file endless vague patents so as to provide endless legal challenges to small competitors. Copyright and patent law as currently implemented and practiced are fundamentally broken and far diverged from any principled, meaningful benefit to the people. There are what, 2 publishers now? Five nines of commercially viable patents go to megacorps and universities? Seven nines of all music and media belong to conglomerates of one sort or another? Something like that. I understand the intent of the original implementations of copyright, and maybe the laws even made sense for a few years, but either they were corrupt from the start, or they were so badly written that they never had a shot at achieving any sort of meaningful ROI for the price paid by the public.

shmerl 10mo ago

Anti competitive "standard business practices" should be counteracted with good enough competition law that forbids them. As simple as that. So I totally agree with the above comment. They simply shouldn't be able to prevent open implementations.

gethly 10mo ago

you are confusing standards with patents.

themafia 10mo ago

> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free. This would only make sense if there _wasn't_ free video standards competing with HDMI. How is it that one group managed to do this for free yet the other group charges clearly exorbitant rates for a nearly equivalent product. > They own IP. That isn't nearly as valuable as they say it is. They only do this to prevent piracy and not to promote any useful technical standard. > People want to use that IP. People are _forced_ to because the same group practically gives away their technology under certain conditions so their connectors get added to nearly every extant device. I don't _want_ to use HDMI. I'm simply _forced_ to through market manipulation. > want to make money. Selling drugs would earn them more money. Why don't we tolerate that? It could be, under some torturous logic, be just another "standard business practice." In fact looking at our laws I see tons of "standard business practices" that are now flatly illegal. The law is a tool. It can be changed. It should be changed. The citizens pay for 85% of it and while businesses only pay 7%. Why do their "standard practices" hold a candle to the "needs of the citizens."

wildzzz 10mo ago
It all stems from the companies behind the HDMI authority. It's basically all of the major AV device makers circa early 2000s. They wrote the spec and added it to all of their products. Displayport wasn't around just yet so HDMI just beat it to market. Since everyone needed an HDMI thing to go with their HDMI thing, everyone else jumped on the HDMI bandwagon. Although I'm really not sure how HDMI managed to get it's way into PCs. Displayport should have just cornered the entire market, it's very popular on business-class machines. I'm guessing it's because of HTPCs and people wanting to put big TVs on their PCs is what led to the adoption.
- larusso 10mo ago
  I think the HDMI connectors popped up at the same time screens switched from 16:10 (VESA compatible at the time) to 16:9 to be more cost effective for the manufacturers. But I’m not sure why. I looked at graphicscards and wondered why HDMI suddenly gained traction in the PC space even after the release of DisplayPort. I think this should never have happened.

perching_aix 10mo ago

"Hard work" is the worst way to make money at scale, so that argument rings more than just a little hollow, especially when defending access control based moneymaking.

johncolanduoni 10mo ago

How much money could PCI SIG possibly be making for the rightsholders with those fees? They’re not charged to members, they’re not per-seat (so each company only needs to pay once even if they have 100 engineers that need to read it), and they don’t include patent licenses for shipping actual hardware. Nobody’s business model is threatened even slightly by making the standards public. And as we saw with AV1 vs H.265, the IP encumbrance of multiparty standards can create barriers that kill their adoption and the corresponding ability for rightsholders to make money off them. It looks like that family of encodings is going to die off, with basically zero interest from anybody in licensing H.266 when you’ll be able to build AV2 software and hardware for free.

nottorp 10mo ago

> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free. Are you sure that's what's in play here? I don't think anyone gives a shit about using HDMI. They want video and audio to work on their TV. Now tell me how many TVs with non-HDMI ports are out there, and tell me with a straight face that it isn't due to pressure from the "consortium". Edit: by the way the video signaling was identical between DVI and HDMI in the beginning. So whose hard work was it?