As he points out, it’s not as though Mozilla has never before supported proprietary formats (e.g. GIF).
— John Gruber
Imagine also if Mozilla had taken the same stance against GIF images in the early 2000's when the format was patent-encumbered just as H.264 is today; the browser barely would have gotten off the ground. In that instance, pragmatism and the need to not break the web won out over a desire to only support free and open formats.In researching this I did find one clear difference between the GIF decision and the H.264 decision that is not highlighted by either of the authors linked below. In the past, UNISYS announced that they would begin charging money for GIF years after the format became popular. This differs from today's debate, where MPEG LA has ensured from the beginning that H.264 is clearly encumbered, licensed, and so forth. In such an environment I think it is very sensible to worry more about H.264 than they did about GIF in the past. It's not as simple as "they did it once, they can do it again".
— Brian Crescimanno
Most people don't understand that something very dangerous is taking place behind the scenes... Unisys was asking some website owners $5000 to $7500 to able to use GIFs on their sites... We're looking at the same situation with H.264, except at a far larger scale.posted by crysflame at 10:40 AM on March 21, 2010 [3 favorites]
— Chris Blizzard
The problem arises in that, to make Theora perform as well as H.264, it would effectively become H.264. Once you add in features such as adaptive block size, motion prediction and compensation, and better psychovisual modeling, you get very much the same end result in terms of size and qualityWell, that's the trouble with patents. Something like "adaptive block size" is pretty obvious, and so is motion compensation. But if you come up with new words and new (if isomorphic math) to describe it then would the patent still apply? I mean, I think someone proved that fractal image compression and wavelet image compression are equivalent, but that doesn't mean that suddenly the fractal image patent would apply to JPEG2000 or something (I don't know how accurate that actually is)
The present invention is based o finding that an improved compression efficiency can be obtained by initializing the context modeler so that the initialization probability information is different from equip-probable distribution for all symbols in the symbol set in question"That actually does seem pretty obvious to me. Now, maybe the insides of this context modeler are really complicated, I don't know. There are different techniques for figuring out conditional probability that could be used, skimming the rest of this I'm not seeing anything too specific.
delmoi: This is one of the many patents in the MPEG-LA patent pool for H.264. It's owned by the Fraunhofer Society, a major German research foundation which gets a major part of its revenue from patent licensing. Can you please, hand on heart, tell me that what it covers, as defined by claim 1 (click on the "Original document" tab, go to page 25, bottom right corner, line 46), was obvious at the time?)posted by delmoi at 12:57 PM on March 21, 2010
Plus, it really hurts Linux advocacy. "It can't play MP3s? It can't play this kind of video or that kind of video?" "Well, it could, but a bunch of fat guys with beards decided that's against their ideology, so you have to install a bunch of packages with names like 'gstreamer-ugly' to do what every other desktop OS does out of the box".Well, it would also be illegal to include out of the box without a license. Also, everyone currently has to download flash to view video online, which isn't really that different.
The argument is that intellectual property rights encourage ideas to be brought to the market and the market in turn gives feedback that encourages further development of valuable ideas. Thus, in the end, society benefits.Except NO ONE learns anything by reading software patents. In fact, software writers are actively discouraged from even looking at them, for fear that they might 'knowingly infringe'. Maybe if there's some super-awesome idea that gets patented people might take notice, but in general these things come out in academic papers first.
Well then, if you can show that it would have been obvious in 2003 to a person having ordinary skill in the art of video codec design, then there are people who would love for you to tell them so they can invalidate the patent. They'd probably pay you handsomely for your trouble, too.The arithmetic coding doesn't really have anything to do with video codecs, it's pretty generalized to any data, and I'm quite sure I learned about arithmetic coding before 2003. There's really only one difference, and that's switching between multiple probability contexts. But really, there's nothing non-obvious about it, not that I can see.
How does Mozilla generate revenue?So their not dependent on any donors. And in fact, they made almost 80 million in '08.
The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from partners such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, EBay, and others. Mozilla takes in additional revenue from donations, online affiliate programs, the Mozilla Store, and income on our invested assets. In 2008, we expanded our Firefox partnerships with new firms such as Yandex (Russia Search), Canonical (Ubuntu), and Nokia (Mobile).
Indeed, the patent system, by encouraging publication, has been an important part of this exchange of information since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.Yes, this is the PR line that is trotted out by supporters of the patent system. Many of us don't buy the spin. We see it as a system to create and protect entitlement going right back to its ‘by royal decree’ days.
NO, I don't understand much about that particular patent. I picked it up as merely an example, the oldest patent from among the whole bunch contributed by Fraunhofer to MPEG-LA.Well, you picked it.
The ball is in your camp, not mine. You say that how the initialization probability information provided by the initializer is determined based on an estimation of symbol statistics relating to the start symbol would have been obvious.My understanding was that that the start symbol is a special case that simply tells you which context to use. The symbol basically says "Use context #4" followed by data until you see an end symbol (followed by another start symbol) That part wouldn't even need to be explained because it's so obvious.
That claim needs proof, and handwaving about Ogg, the Linux kernel and Firefox ain't it. Ogg is technically off the pace, Linux has been trying to crack the desktop for a decade and still is while the commercial companies have moved on to mobile, and if Firefox and the Webkit browsers haven't swapped places within five years I'll eat my Netscape Navigator floppies. (Sooner, if they don't buckle to h.264). -- bonaldiOkay so first of all, millions of people use android or Palm Pres, which use the Linux kernel. Millions of people use web services that run on Linux servers. Just because you don't personally use Linux on your PC doesn't mean it hasn't had an impact on you life. And millions of people use Firefox today
(*) Apologies for the sarcasm, delmoi, but it was just too easy :) Seriously though, you're giving the kind of dismissive "oh it just uses math" kind of hand-waving and seriously selling the specifics short. The devil very much is in the details, and it has taken a long time to get this good;Heh. I don't disagree. The problem is that the "Specifics" (i.e. the best parameterization) aren't really the inventions that they are trying to patent. Like if they were just saying "this is the best table to use to seed an arithmetic coding probability estimator", then you could just perturb those tables a little to get around the patent. We have a patent system that is supposed to reward "ideas" and not all the effort that goes into perfecting it.
Cute. But he admitted he didn't understand the patent, so the comment that you excerpted was, in fact, correct. Also, if you think some other statement I made was incorrect, please specify.Skeptic, I asked you what you thought was non obvious about it. Do you actually understand a word of what you pasted? [-- me]Delmoi, you're not a troll, but you are acting like one here. You keep arguing, saying things that aren't true and sticking with them even when people explain to you why you're wrong. Give it a rest. -- Blazecock Pileon
The Trabant also worked. The East Germans still dumped it as soon as they could get their hands on much more sophisticated cars "encumbered" by thousands of patents filed by the West German car industry...That's such a red herring I don't know where to begin. But first of all I don't think the communists were spending a lot of time enforcing capitalist patents. Second of all, video is video. PNG files don't look any worse then GIFs, Ogg Vorbis files don't sound any worse then MP3s. Patent un-encumbered files work fine. The problem here is that people want to standardize on patent-protected formats, rather then open ones. Yes, the compression rate is lower, but when we're all rocking 100mbps downlinks in a few years it's not going to matter that much.
No, that's a new argument, one that it would have looked more reasonable for you to take a pop at. The actual argument was that no-one would ever have crated a good codec on the level of h.264.That just seems like a pointless question. Who cares how "good" it is as long as it's "good enough". In a few years we'll all have a lot more bandwidth anyway.
Well, er, precisely. If it was a choice between the patent system and UIs that looked like Linux, Ogg videos and in general a world of less-good, shittier software I know which I'd choose.Well, first of all everyone says Unbuntu looks nice now. I use an OS from Microsoft, which doesn't even look at patents when they write code, and doesn't make much of their money from patent licensing, and doesn't use their patent portfolio to stop anyone from writing competitive software as far as I know. They don't need to, because the code bases are so huge that copyright is enough of a protection.
They are: they're granting patents on novel inventions and enshrining the patent system in law. That's easily worth more than $50bn, and it comes without them having to actually spend $50bn.Instead of spending the money directly, they're forcing everyone else to spend it my granting economic rents. The argument is the net cost to society is higher to $50 billion dollars, where as a tax subsidized grant program would only cost society $50 billion. Because in addition to patent licensing fees, there's also opportunity cost for technology that's not used, like this HTML5 video fragmentation we're seeing now.
And this without considering that, if governments were actively dictating how all IT research money was spent, we'd probably still working on increasing the speed of punchcard readers.Yeah, along with the internet that was created with government funding, and the the world wide web which created at CERN. That's just the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. The government has already played a huge role in creating software. The Internet and the web are the most obvious examples. I suppose you've never used the crappy, patent unencumbered Firefox browser either, right?
My point in citing the Trabant was to expose your "good enough" philosophy. The Trabant was "good enough". Except that it wasn't, once it came in contention with technology that had been developed thanks to the incentives provided with patents and good old capitalistic greed.Capitalistic greed, yes. Patents? Well, we don't know. Famously ford and other companies ripped off the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers. Ultimately, patents are anti-capitalist. They grant monopolies to people, irrespective of their ability to do things. But I'm not arguing against automotive patents at all, so it's totally irrelevant.
also its inefficiences translate into wasted energy, which we're trying to conserve. I'd say enabling people and corporations to do their very best has a very real point.Oh, come on. There are million things we can be making more efficient before we start worrying about less compressed video.
That the programmers themselves don't necessarily think about patents has zip to do with their stimulus effect: the people who pay the programmers' salaries do think about patents and that's why, in the end, and as you already conceded, patents ultimately mean higher-quality software.How much money has Microsoft made because of patent licensing? That's just such a B.S. argument. Because someone files a patent does not mean they've made any money from it, or been motivated by it. Microsoft makes money by selling software. They use copyright law to protect their work. Patent law isn't part of it. If software patents were all invalidated tomorrow, it wouldn't affect Microsoft's bottom line one bit, and it wouldn't have made any difference for them in the past, except for their not being sued by patent trolls.
Video drives the growth of the internet... Initially, in the form of porn, but as the bandwidth grew to handle it, we got YouTube. Google in no way exaggerates to say that, for them, +50% amounts to crippling the internet as we know it.And those companies would have a ton of reasons to dump a ton of money into researching video codecs, even if they didn't get patent protection. The bandwidth cost savings would pay for the research.
So if people couldn't get patents on software, stuff would still exist it just wouldn't be as good.you were just ... crazy? OK.
So, wait, do the programmers take copyright into consideration when they code?How does that even make sense? Writers don't take copyright into consideration when they write, because they are creating something new. It's only an issue if you plagiarize something. Unless you're copy and pasting someone Else's code, then copyright concerns are irrelevant. If you are copying and pasting code, which happens a lot in the Open Source world then of course people do care about the copyright on code they reuse. They're careful about not mixing incompatible licenses and soforth.
Lets see if you can follow the logic here:So if people couldn't get patents on software, stuff would still exist it just wouldn't be as good.you were just ... crazy? OK.
1) Software packages are created by people who have some motivation to write software
2) Those motivations may be different
3) Some people might write software in hope of licensing a patent, while others might write software in order to sell copies (protected by copyright). Others may have some other motivation
4) Once the work has been done, people may choose to acquire a patent, and there are many different reasons. They may want it for defensive purposes, or to license it, whatever.
5) Therefore the fact that someone acquired a patent related to software they wrote is not sufficient to show that they wrote the software because of the possibility of licensing the patent
It's the company as a whole that matters here. Well, and all those times they've used their patent portfolio as a cudgel ... unfortunately as you keep insisting that patents are irrelevant to them you can't use those examples, because they won't exist in your non-fact-checking world.I didn't say that Microsoft never took any advantage of it's patent portfolio. What I said is that it's a side issue to their main business of writing and selling code. Again. If 99% of their revenue comes from software that they sell, and 1% comes from patents, then patents are largely irrelevant. These numbers matter. Microsoft doesn't seem to list any revenue as directly from patent licensing in. The fundamental question is: How much of Microsoft business would be different if there were no software patents? Would windows still exist and be about as good as it is? Internet Explorer? Office? SQL server and exchange? How would Microsoft's products be any worse without patent protection?
But we can see a lot of correlation between the best software and patents and copyright. Arguing there's no connection is fruitless.What a bizarre statement. We're talking about patents, and you bring up "patents and copyright". That's like arguing that rickshaws are a common mode of transportation in north America by saying "almost everyone gets around in a rickshaws or an automobile!". My entire point is that copyright alone is sufficient protection for software! All major open source projects are copyrighted and use copyright law to enforce their openness (albeit with the theory that if copyright law didn't exist, it wouldn't be necessary)
Tech companies are patenting furiously, all the time. Not so much to actually sue people, but as a kind of mutually-assured-destruction shield against one another.So you're basically proving my point. People take out patents in order to defend against anyone who might sue them for patent infringement. You argue that the "stimulus is obvious" but in fact it's just a stimulus for patent lawyers. If no one else had patents, defensive patents would likewise be unneeded. People would still have written the software.
That the programmers themselves don't necessarily think about patents has zip to do with their stimulus effect: the people who pay the programmers' salaries do think about patents and that's why, in the end, and as you already conceded, patents ultimately mean higher-quality software.
Let us say then that there is a class of software -- a class that happens to be the subject of this thread and, you know, the whole point -- where you concede patents can in theory help protect and incentivise the creation of new and better work.Man, this is just ridiculous. People (including you) started talking about how Linux and Firefox weren't as good as other software products, and then the discussion moved to whether common applications and Operating systems were made better by patents. you argued that they were I argued that they weren't. Despite the fact that the thread was "about" this codec you argued that patents made Windows and most commercial software better! And I argued against it.
That claim [that software would have been written without patents] needs proof, and handwaving about Ogg, the Linux kernel and Firefox ain't it.Are you giving up on the argument that windows and other mainstream programs have been improved by patents? And if so, are you now trying to claim that you didn't even make them, and that my response to them was totally spurious and some kind of derail?
...
Linux has been trying to crack the desktop for a decade and still is while the commercial companies have moved on to mobile
...
Is good work done by people operating without making use of the financial incentives enabled by copyright and patents? Sure. Are their alternative incentives anything like as good at producing new and ground-breaking work? Nope, at least so far. It's all copy and clone.
...
Windows is patented up the wazoo (MS has 14000 on file in the US alone). Firefox sprang from Netscape, whose parent company fought more than one patent battle and who themselves took out 70-odd patents
And you think that maybe in practice there could be other incentives, that the work would happen without patents. It hasn't happened yet, at all -- all the good work that has been done in the space has been patented, and those patents have been exploited and formed the primary economic foundation for more work in the area -- but you reckon it could happen, maybe, perhaps, in practice.What? Are you seriously arguing that because something hasn't happened it couldn't happen? And more importantly the fact that some of the key technology got patented right away makes it more difficult for alternatives to get started. My argument was that in the absence of software patents, it would be easy to develop complex software like video codecs (and I gave an example, the Linux kernel as something that required a lot of work to create, but software patents were not required for it to be profitable -- which lead you to start talking about how crappy Linux was, etc).
except by dragging in examples like Firefox which later turn out to be from your other class of software, so that you then have to rule them out again.My god you're confused. An example of software "like this" that's not patent encumbered would be the PNG image format. Or Ogg Vorbis, which works as well as MP3. Or you could look at the 3d Engines from id software -- which is an example of closed-source software that's extremely complex and protected by copyright, from a company that's been ideologically opposed to software patents. A lot of their stuff could have been patented, I'm sure. But it wasn't and the company did fine and makes a lot of money. I think an OS kernel has a similar experimentation / final result ratio too.
1) Class 1 software involves things that take a lot of research and testing before the final results are chosen and implemented. That research is what gets protected by the patent, and patents can motivate people to do the research. But they could also be motivated by something else! Like saving money on bandwidth costs.So there would be some changes with group one if software patents went away. I think the benefits would outweigh the costs. And if the software isn't as good, it's not going to be something like having an unpleasant or difficult to use user experience (which is what most people mean when they say 'bad software') rather it just means lower compression rates for video, basically.
2) Class 2 is software is stuff that most of the effort is in writing the code, and copyright protects that effort just fine, because copying all the ideas would take as much effort as implementing them in the first place. This is the vast majority of the software industry, and would be entirely unaffected by the loss of software patents.
A few thousand words later you'd managed to do out loud and in public the thinking that should have been done before your first comment, and decided that overall the work really would happen without patents, because in one fairly specific case at global scale -- Google, essentially -- the bandwidth savings could make it worth their while. And if that didn't apply, perhaps something else maybe would? Or the government could pay $50bn, maybe?Yes, but I don't think that's any different then what I thought at the start of the thread, but my explanation probably got more clear.
So, to recap: Patents are said to incentivise extra effort and investment in the creation of software (at least certain kinds of it, anyway). Some people make great software without patents. The overwhelming majority of great software, however, is made by people who make use of the protections provided by patents.Right and my argument is that the vast majority of the value is created by copyrights, not patents and that patent protection is just 'icing on the cake', so to speak. Once the work is done, there's no reason not to take out patents.
That all these businesses are taking out these protections suggests that they have some real value to them, and thus can act as incentives. (That the patents are not used in anger nearly as much as the protections of copyrights are is really irrelevant: nuclear weapons are hardly ever used, but you can't say they're not a terrific incentive.)Right, but the question is "how much of an incentive are they?" and in my view they would only be a tiny part of the motivation for creating something like Windows, Office, etc. Now the problem here is that neither one of us actually has any evidence about how large that portion actually is. I say very small, you seem to be saying much more important.
The argument is actually "we'd still end up with codecs like h.264 if we took away patents tomorrow, and the evidence for that is, well, uh, hey!, um, look over there at id software." When you first put a version of that claim forward I said it needed proof -- and that nothing you'd said amounted to anything like that proof.Well, and the thing is there is obviously no way to absolutely prove what would have happened if there were no software patents. I think it's clear that people do work on codecs and compression libraries without needing the possibility of a patent to motivate them. The specific examples I gave were PNG and Ogg Vorbis, which are closely analogous. Moving toward less analogous examples, you have the Linux Kernel and id software's engines.
Your claim that even if you took patents away companies would continue to invest in software R&D in exactly the same way as they do now still stands unproven.As is the claim that they would not.
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