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A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux
- unfitted2545 2mo agoAre patents a necessary evil?
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo agoSoftware patents, no. They're just evil.
- yndoendo 2mo agoDepends on how they are used. Let say you come up with a patent. You let open source use the patent, GPL3 ..., for free why charging close source solutions. That could go to funding the open source development or other gains. FANNG has the money, take it from the them by all means.
- killerstorm 2mo agoSuppose you came up with AI algorithm which is better than transformers and such. Your options are: 1. publish it e.g. as a paper or open source, letting all big AI labs to use it for free 2. keep it secret Are you saying that it's evil to have a secret third option of making the algorithm public but forcing AI labs to share profit if they use it?
- basilikum 2mo agoNot OC, but yes.
- throw_m239339 2mo agothen keep it secret, someone else will discover it eventually. Software patents are evil.
- dlcarrier 2mo agoI used to think they were entirely useless, but since then I've learned of many instances where a much better technology is developed because the first iteration is patented. For example, the Wright brothers biggest contribution to aviation was suing everyone using wing warping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war) which greatly advanced the adoption of the much more advanced ailerons. Software patents have a similar effect, for example Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol (https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm). We tend to invest heavily in whatever we can get working first, but it's rarely close to an ideal way of doing something. By pushing every developer to find a newer, better way of doing something, patents prevent stagnation and lead to more advanced technologies.
- cogman10 2mo agoThis sort of benefit in software can be realized with much shorter terms. A 5 or 10 year term would accomplish pretty much all the same benefits. 25 years is just way too long for software.
- dlcarrier 2mo agoThe benefit comes from no one ever using the earlier inferior versions.
- cogman10 2mo agoCorrect. 5 years is long enough to kill off inferior standards and let superior ones blossom.
- mrheosuper 2mo agoif it's inferior, why does it matter if it's 5 years or 25 years ?
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- somat 2mo agoI don't think patents are inherently evil, however they certainly can be used for evil. But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game. It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoThe problem often stems from the Patent Offices getting caught flat-footed with new tech. When the patent officers don't know enough about the field they are reviewing it is easy for things which are "obvious to experts in the field" or "overly broad" to slip thru and cause major headaches for everyone.
- somat 2mo agoIt does not help that things fundamental to the new tech, even though they took real effort to develop, are now exactly those items that are now "obvious to experts in the field" and "overly broad" And then have fun trying to distinguish real fundamentals from items in the form of (existing invention "with a computer") Or whatever the hot new tech of the day is. A good example(old enough to not matter any more) is the how the Wright brothers invented something fundamentally new, their patent was on how to control an airplane, The problem is, once you see it, it is obvious how to control an airplane. Birds do it, Why should such an simple thing be protected? But conversely. This is a discipline that took the Wrights many years of hard and meticulous work to figure out. Is it morally correct to say "No, we are not going to grant you exploitation rights to this thing you invested so much time and effort developing"?
- foobar1274278 2mo agoCool, now do these: "Buying something over the web", Amazon, 1997: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en "Rounded corners in a GUI", Apple, 2014: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9396565B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9396565B2/en
- bitwize 2mo agoSoftware patents may be what saves the field. Currently copyright as an IP protection for software has been rendered near meaningless by AI. If I can get one AI to reverse engineer Photoshop, and another to implement the produced spec, I have a copyright-clean version of Photoshop. Patents protect the idea of a particular program. And in the post-AI world, it's the idea that holds the value, not the implementation. Implementations are cheap now. Another alternative to preventing the entire software market from collapsing is to revive the Whelan v. Jaslow copyright standard, under which the abstract "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program is eligible for copyright. But programmers would bristle at that almost as much as robust patent protection for software. Until, that is, the money comes in with mouths to feed and mortgages to pay...
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoYou don't know what code the A.I has been trained on. It may very well be reproducing actual Copyrighted material it has been trained on. This is the major reason why most large open-source projects are banning big code contributions made with A.I
- chrismorgan 2mo agoMost large open-source projects banning AI contributions have been doing it for social and technical reasons, not legal. As for the copyright infringement angle, it’s well and truly too late for that to be a meaningful problem, socially and politically. It’s easily in “too big to fail” territory now—any striking down of the “fair use” exemption claim would kill the entire industry dead, because every one of them would have to throw away all their models and synthetic data and start again, and that’s geopolitically untenable. They moved too fast for judiciary to regulate them, and I think the window of opportunity for legislature to regulate them closed no later than 2024.
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoYou are wrong about why open-source projects are banning AI contributions. While vibe-coded slop is obviously a pain, many are banning even their own well-known contributors from using A.I to write large parts of code due to legal concerns. I'm sure the patent/copyright trolls care a lot about the "industry." It is still the early days but eventually they will come on knocking.
- _carbyau_ 2mo agoA patent was meant to give a solo genius a way to treat their idea as something tangible, at a time when logistics was much slower and the world revolved around the physical. Maybe they try to develop it themselves, maybe they sell the idea to a big corporation that has the resources to implement it. Either way, genius begets profit, and the world gets genius ideas... in theory anyway. But a genuine idea back then needed a long time frame to actually do something with it. 20 years seemed reasonable at the time. The world is less logistically constrained these days. Make it 5 years, no renewals.
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoA patent is meant to encourage people and companies to share the details of their inventions, instead of keeping them secret. In return the inventors get protection for a certain number of years.
- robocat 2mo agoThat was the stated purpose of a patent. The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that. I wonder how much of ADSL's advantage is due to trade secrets (spread across many vendors) versus how much has been published as patents.
- Brendinooo 2mo ago>The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that I'm not sure if that's true, or if it's more that 1) we hear more about the more egregious stuff and/or 2) something was lost in translation with that stated purpose when the world went digital.
- robocat 2mo agoPatents are not discussed as inventions any more. Other aspects now matter: defensive patents, patent pools, patent trolls, patent portfolios, etc. Triple damages made a farce of patents as dissemination of invention.
- jayanmn 2mo agoOur demand for perfectionism prevent any progress. I would consider shortening patent length that can help everyone. With all the improvements in the world we could afford shorter window.
- yxhuvud 2mo agoAt least in the chemistry/pharma industries, yes, due to the (necessary) regulatory structures there. But in modern tech? No.
- vectorinox 2mo agoI would recommend that great academic (but very digest) book titled "Against Intellectual Monopoly" to understand why the answer is most certainly "no" (though, their answser is closer to "yes" for pharmacetical patents).
- Asooka 2mo agoI think of them as legalised marijuana. It is not good for you, but if it were made illegal, there will be criminal organisations providing the service. Without patents, we would be mired in NDAs dictating which company can talk to which other company about what technology, and quite possibly several open-source developers passing away in mysterious circumstances. So I see it as unavoidable evil. The patent system makes it lawful evil as opposed to chaotic evil, which is strictly speaking an improvement.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoIt's more like legalized crack, it's almost never used for any remotely positive use
- PowerElectronix 2mo agoMore like an optional evil that benefits laywers, lawmakers and ill intentioned folks and makes everyone else way worse off.
- Zigurd 2mo agoPatents are a deal made between innovators and governments. I especially dislike this term "intellectual property" because it tries to turn that deal into a right. That feels benign because the little guy innovator depends on rights. But what really happens is that it turns patents into a sacred object. They're not. While it would be a bad idea to do so, mere legislation can set the terms of a patent to any length down to zero or out to forever. It's not a right. It's a deal meant to be beneficial to society in return for the government enforcing a limited term monopoly.
- grishka 2mo agoThey're a nice idea poorly executed. If they would last something like 5 years instead of 20, and only be assignable to individuals, not companies, and non-transferable, they could work as intended.
- oconnor663 2mo agoI don't know anything about pharma, but having worked in tech and had my share of patent lawyer meetings, it sure doesn't seem like software patents are necessary at all. That said, a patent system has a lot of free parameters that you can dial to reduce the cost. At the silly limit, if patents were only good for 24 hours, the cost to society would be ~zero (though also the benefit would be zero), so it's hard to call that "evil" in the sense of definitely causing a lot of harm. The question becomes whether/when you can set all the free parameters to something worth having.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoDiscussion on the news in July: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969635
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- senshan 2mo agoBrazil? Why a Brazilian patent is of such a significant interest elsewhere?
- nemomarx 2mo agoI think this was the final patent on it that was valid anywhere, so now the status changes from "someone has a patent globally and we need to consider this" to "no one has a patent." If you're distributing something globally, even one market that still has the patent might stop you from default shipping a driver touching on it, or you might have to worry about court orders at least. It's hard to avoid jurisdictions on the open web.
- senshan 2mo agoRight, but I thought it matters only if you sell something globally. Linux is distributed for free, so the burden of patent compliance is on the user, isn't it?
- nemomarx 2mo agoNot a lawyer, but patent law refers to distribution too. It shouldn't matter if it's free or has a price if they can say you're distributing it to Brazilian users.
- dymk 2mo agoPlenty of open source software avoids using patents even though it’s free. Selling doesn’t factor into it.
- pjc50 2mo agoNope. Distribution is what matters.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoBoth Ubuntu and RedHad sell a product, as do few other
- breakingcups 2mo ago
- Dylan16807 2mo ago> The videos we watch on modern systems using H.264/AVC tech are running off MPEG-4 Part 10, and that is still very much covered by patents. I dispute "very much". It came out in 2004 and almost all the patents are gone.
- ksec 2mo agoIndeed. And it is Siemens again [1], only 5 left, and Siemens' one being 2030. I am also interested if EVC Baseline profile will become patent free soon. Given it is built on top of AVC. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
- nnevatie 2mo ago> MPEG-4 Part 2 Yes, if you care about the DVD-era still. If not, this expiry doesn't have a big impact on anything.
- nashashmi 2mo agoI remember DivX fondly. Even on dialup, picture quality was just phenomenal. Web tv watching was actually doable after this edit: I am talking about divx web player
- BarryGuff 2mo ago> I remember DivX fondly Now THAT'S a name I haven't heard in a long time. Yes, DivX was the sh*t back in the day. So good!
- daneel_w 2mo agoWith emphasis on shit. Really. I can relate to the rose-tinted memories, but DivX and XviD both encode to MPEG-4 ASP which has a lot of shortcomings that manifestly result in the infamous sludgy green-purple banding artefacts of the time, no matter how good the chosen encoder is. XviD is the better of those two MPEG-4 ASP encoders, but it simply does not look good in an absolute sense, just in a relative sense compared to the alternatives of the era.
- anthk 2mo agoAt 1024x768, compared to my Nokia 14" CRT TV it looked good enough.
- daneel_w 2mo agoIt was absolutely a good enough solution compared to the long wait for DVD releases and shelling out tons of money.
- close04 2mo ago> just in a relative sense compared to the alternatives of the era This is common sense. Nobody thinks the original iPhone is revolutionary today, but they do think it was revolutionary for the time.
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
- Brendinooo 2mo agoWhat other tech patents did we somewhat resent being patented that are now expired? I'm also thinking about the click wheel; I got one of my kids a knockoff iPod for Christmas last year. Can other e-commerce sites legally "one-click" to purchase like Amazon now?!?
- nemomarx 2mo agoBack in 2017 - https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en Although I don't see a lot of other sites using it. You'd think Shopify would?
- jakevoytko 2mo agoI worked at Etsy when it expired and the execs got this question a lot. The TL;DR is that the expected outcome is that it massively increases the support burden (wait I didn't mean to click that; wait I actually need to send it to another address; wait I didn't realize shipping was a hundred dollars) without really enabling more sales. So it was a neat idea and worth trying when ecommerce was new, but now we know enough about ecommerce to know that the user has to confirm details of their purchase.
- dabinat 2mo agoI always thought the physical buttons Amazon used to offer were interesting. The idea is that if you’re at an office and you have reams of paper stored near the printer, you put a button next to them. Then whoever grabs the last one hits the button and it automatically orders more. But I’d imagine they discontinued them precisely for the reasons you describe.
- Paul_Clayton 2mo agoWould having prominent "cancel order" and/or "edit order" buttons and delayed payment processing have sufficiently reduced the support costs for such cases? (I am guessing not since such is an obvious method of providing a fast/easy default with a somewhat easy undo, but sometimes the obvious is missed or turns out to add problems -- like people seeing a prominent "edit/cancel order" and assuming it meant 'confirm/place order' as used by every other site.)
- FuturisticLover 2mo agoSiemens holding one of the key patents in video codecs surprises me. I am not technically savvy, but I thought telecom infrastructure or direct media companies would hold the most important patents on this.
- miguelxpn 2mo agoIf I'm not mistaken they had a telecom infrastructure division at one point.
- cestith 2mo agoSiemens started as a communications company. The first invention was a type of telegraph. Siemens had a division called Siemens Communications Systems. They split that into Siemens Communications Systems (public networks) and Siemens Information Systems (PBX systems and such) in the mid 1980s. The company did a reorg in the late 1990s into four divisions. Those were rail, industrial, power generation, and information & communications systems. That was again called Siemens Communications Systems. SCS was rebranded to Unify in 2013. Unify was sold to Atos in 2016. Mitel bought it from Atos around 2023. Unify is currently still a subsidiary of Mitel. Parts of the communications division had been split off and went through separate M&A activity previously. The DCO and EWSD were notable digital central office phone switches. The EWSD ended up at Nokia through some M&A activity. The EWSD was commissioned into phone company offices right up until 2017. When I was in the dial-up ISP world and had dozens of contacts within phone companies, the joke backronym for it was Europe’s Worst Switching Device. It was actually pretty reliable if the software was kept up to date, but there are hilarious stories about early models and unpatched installations. I have one of those stories in personal memory. Fun facts: EWSD was a joint project in some way with Bosch, ran an operating system, and was one of the major projects in the world that used the CHILL programming language.
- holgerschurig 2mo ago"They split that" ... Most corporate companies have a (pointless?) 7-year cycle of "we need to diversificate" followed by a "we need to concentrate". That is/was also visible at at Siemens. As a result, the Siemens from now is quite different to the Siemens from 15 years ago.
- alexthedigger 2mo agoI hate AI generated posts
- shevy-java 2mo ago> Getting media to work on Linux is more complex than you may think. Not at all: ffmpeg + mpv Problem solved. > a lot less feasible for Linux distributions designed to be freely downloaded and redistributed. > [...] spent some time enabling third-party repositories to get multimedia codecs, you already know what it's like Well, this was quite easy on debian, but I abandoned being a slave to distributions. I compile from source as-is, using a set of ruby scripts (primarily), not unlike homebrew, but based on YAML rather than ruby classes 1:1 (this YAML dataset is expanded into variables that fully describe how a program is installed, what it installs, and so forth, so any other programming language can also evaluate the same dataset here; I just wrote the first implementation via ruby as such, but I can add support for other languages easily, or someone else can, it is open by design). What the article describes really is, at worst, a problem for some distribution. But even there it was never any problem to have support for multimedia, unless the distribution sucks. Many distributions suck, but many other distributions are also excellent. Arch is IMO much better than debian, by default. In fact, both debian and the rpm-based distributions, are usually quite retarded by default. Arch, Gentoo and many more, even oldschool slackware, are much saner by default. I have no idea why retarded distributions became so dominant, probably because they were very easy to get going (see ubuntu). But quite frankly, the article really blows this all out of proportion. Enabling support for codecs is easy, even on most of the retarded distributions. I don't see video patent being a problem though really. The real test step for linux will be the upcoming mandatory age sniffing. People already looked with deep worry at systemd running ahead and supporting age sniffing (see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954). Now the legislation is slowly changing to force everyone to give up their age. Microsoft will push next here, via Windows. You heard this here first. Age sniffing will come - the lobbyists were all already paid to force this. The big commercial distributions will go force and ID its users.
- semiquaver 2mo agoThe headache is ended until Siemens patents the extended-release version of the video algorithm, that is…
- stlahxm 2mo ago[flagged]