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Of course you can't use this compression technique without being sued. And that is the key reason software patents are really bad. You may hear a lot about tro

Of course you can't use this compression technique without being sued. And that is the key reason software patents are really bad. You may hear a lot about trolls and grossly invalid obvious patents making millions in licensing and extortion by legal fees and I agree those things are bad. They are very bad. But the real problem is the apparently valid patents. Monopolizing a programming technique is a long-term barrier to invention that provides little or no incentive to create anything new compared to all the invention it prohibits. It's the same in any field where experimentation doesn't require billion dollar research teams and each new idea is built on thousands of others. No new work you do in video, audio, or image processing or encoding will be legal without a mountain of licensing agreements. Anything beyond common established software applications will be unlicensable and effectively outlawed. Google had to fight for years with a giant legal team to get permission to release WebM and you don't have that kind of power.

bsdetector 12y ago
> It's the same in any field where experimentation doesn't require billion dollar research teams and each new idea is built on thousands of others. So how little money do you believe has been spent creating MPEG, H.264, H.265, and all the other codecs? Do you think these were created by a handful of people in a garage over a weekend? Meetings for these codecs were more than 300 people and those were just representatives of larger groups. This is research that does require billions of dollars and thousands of experts working for years. That's not going to happen as a charity or by weekend hackers. Linus isn't going to get frustrated at the size of video files and take a week off to come up with a better codec. Software patents created these video codecs by funding the research and development, and patents aren't long-term barriers as many of the early formats have expired or are expiring now. You want to use MPEG-1? Go ahead. Or if you want to leverage hundreds of thousands of man-hours experts put into improving on it for the next generation then for a few more years you'll need to pay for it to cover those costs. That's exactly how patents are supposed to work.
- domlebo70 12y ago
  > That's not going to happen as a charity or by weekend hackers. Linus isn't going to get frustrated at the size of video files and take a week off to come up with a better codec. That's kind of what he did with Git.
- rockdoe 12y ago
  > That's not going to happen as a charity or by weekend hackers. To be honest that's exactly what happened with Vorbis (1 FOSS guy) and Opus (2 FOSS guys, 1 Skype guy). The MPEG process is full off politics and massive overheads.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Those are audio codecs, not video codecs. Xiph worked on Theora for 7 years and never got close to H.264, and Daala is promising but HEVC is amazing right now.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      Theora and Daala are both hamstrung by working around minefields of patents on essential processes to video processing.
  - throwawaykf05 12y ago
    Interestingly, the Vorbis project only really took off after mp3 started facing licensing issues. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis > Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. Who says patents don't promote innovation? :-) (I'm only half-joking - invention forced by working around patents has long been a post-facto justification of patents.) Also, nit, it wasn't all done by just "1 FOSS guy". From the same wikipedia link: > Chris Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers.
  - derf_ 12y ago
    In my case, a substantial amount of my work on Opus was done literally from my basement (sorry, I didn't have a garage).

bsdetector 12y ago

> It's the same in any field where experimentation doesn't require billion dollar research teams and each new idea is built on thousands of others. So how little money do you believe has been spent creating MPEG, H.264, H.265, and all the other codecs? Do you think these were created by a handful of people in a garage over a weekend? Meetings for these codecs were more than 300 people and those were just representatives of larger groups. This is research that does require billions of dollars and thousands of experts working for years. That's not going to happen as a charity or by weekend hackers. Linus isn't going to get frustrated at the size of video files and take a week off to come up with a better codec. Software patents created these video codecs by funding the research and development, and patents aren't long-term barriers as many of the early formats have expired or are expiring now. You want to use MPEG-1? Go ahead. Or if you want to leverage hundreds of thousands of man-hours experts put into improving on it for the next generation then for a few more years you'll need to pay for it to cover those costs. That's exactly how patents are supposed to work.

domlebo70 12y ago
> That's not going to happen as a charity or by weekend hackers. Linus isn't going to get frustrated at the size of video files and take a week off to come up with a better codec. That's kind of what he did with Git.
rockdoe 12y ago
> That's not going to happen as a charity or by weekend hackers. To be honest that's exactly what happened with Vorbis (1 FOSS guy) and Opus (2 FOSS guys, 1 Skype guy). The MPEG process is full off politics and massive overheads.
- sp332 12y ago
  Those are audio codecs, not video codecs. Xiph worked on Theora for 7 years and never got close to H.264, and Daala is promising but HEVC is amazing right now.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Theora and Daala are both hamstrung by working around minefields of patents on essential processes to video processing.
- throwawaykf05 12y ago
  Interestingly, the Vorbis project only really took off after mp3 started facing licensing issues. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis > Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. Who says patents don't promote innovation? :-) (I'm only half-joking - invention forced by working around patents has long been a post-facto justification of patents.) Also, nit, it wasn't all done by just "1 FOSS guy". From the same wikipedia link: > Chris Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers.
- derf_ 12y ago
  In my case, a substantial amount of my work on Opus was done literally from my basement (sorry, I didn't have a garage).