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Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

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Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#131

Post by jsprogrammer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #110
jsprogrammer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, determining past obviousness can be hard. That's why you bring an expert or many experts to attest to how obvious the technique is. But you don't need an expert for novelty. Either you can show a prior art or you can't. I'll grant that there may be some some edge cases where the prior art needs some nuanced interpretation from an expert witness.

I think we agree :-). I was thinking of the more subtle version of novelty which is perhaps best expressed as, "as requested". Here is a fictional example of what I'm thinking about. Lets say someone asks you to make a mud pie[1] and put bits of lavastone in it. You make your mud pie and then you patent "system and method for creating a mud pie with lava stones." Perhaps there is no prior art because nobody asked for…

Well, firstly, I think we should probably throw the entire patent system out. It's a hindrance to innovation. In your case, I think you argue that there is nothing special about lava stones, and in fact, dirt/mud contains many stones. Probably, including tiny lava stones, whose only real difference with the additional lava stone bits is size.

So, adding stones is not very novel. There's also not much difference between a lava stone and a non-lava stone; if I can put in a non-lava stone, I can probably just as easily put in a lava stone. Is it not obvious that if I can put a quartz into a mud pie, I could also put a lava stone?

I guess the general strategy is to find the more general pattern and then show that the patent is just a specific instance of a larger, known pattern.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#132

Post by shadowmint »

TheCondor wrote: post #122
mikekchar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "crummy patents" and "having patents at all" are very much intertwined. The problem is the bit about obviousness to someone skilled in the art. Even though I am a programmer, I know nothing at all about video codecs, so nothing seems obvious at all. But to someone skilled at making codecs, it's a different matter. I remember very clearly when Ogg Theora was being developed the difficulty they had in choosing a te…

You can program it, you can use it. You might have trouble distributing it or selling it. Is it better to patent something and tell the whole world how to do it? Or is it better to just keep it secret? It seems like some refinements to when you can sue might be in order, specifically, I might outlaw suing if you don't market an implementation of your own; that radically changes the value of a lot of property though.

> Is it better to patent something and tell the whole world how to do it? Or is it better to just keep it secret?

Where did this 'patents are good because they make inventions public' idea suddenly come from?

I've seen it bandied around a lot lately from people who are uncomfortable with directly supporting patents.

No. It's not better. Don't be ridiculous.

> Or is it better to just keep it secret?

How do you imagine anyone will do that?

Imagine I come up with a new compression algorithm that achieves 1:4 compression on 80% of compressed files and normal 1:2 on the rest.

In a patent system I can:

1) Use it privately and not tell anyone. Keeping it secret.

2) Patent it and license it to other people. I risk being sued out of existence by existing patent holders and trolls.

In a non-patent system I can:

1) Use it privately and not tell anyone. Keeping it secret.

2) Share and sell it as a black box implementation. People will immediately reverse engineer the compression method.

???

How is privacy and secrets an issue here?

In both cases (1) is the best choice if you don't want your competitors to get access to your algorithm.

In the patent case its easier for 3rd parties to find the implementation details by doing no work themselves. It's also significantly more risky.

In the non-patent case, people have to actually work to reverse engineer the implementation, sure, but then they're free to use it. There's also no risk in selling and distributing the product.

So, lets see here, things which are better, since both paths lead to the algorithm being made freely available in the end:

1 - Do research, at risk that you'll get sued into oblivion the moment you publish & sell. Even if you don't immediately get sued, you have zero temporary competitive advantage because you just told every competitor what you're doing.

2 - Do research and have temporary competitive advantage once you release it?

The only people who win in the patent way is lawyers.

The 'secrets are bad' argument is a straw man; first you setup the straw man (but then we would never get to know the secret details!!?!!), then you punch it a few times (but sharing knowledge is good! How will the global body of knowledge grow if everything is just secrets??).

It's just daft.

So yes, "It seems like some refinements to when you can sue might be in order"; indeed; ie. never.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#134

Post by shmerl »

derf_ wrote: post #28
halosghost wrote: post #11

Actually, I'm still rooting for Daala (from Xiph.org, the same folks that did so well with Opus). It's still a long ways away from being finished, but their work is awesome and I've been following it for a while now! Either way, having another effort competing to make a great format is not a problem. Here's hoping it goes well!

Hello, I'm the Daala tech lead. One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Thor and stick them in Daala, and figure out what works best. Some of that experimentation has already begun: https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://review.xiph.org/874/ https://www.ietf.org/p…

Is Thor based on similar principles to Daala (i.e. like lapped transforms) to make it useful for merging?

And unrelated question, what will be the name of the merged codec? I hope it won't remain as NetVC, as that name is awful.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#135

Post by Asbostos »

joepie91_ wrote: post #57
manachar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, because some forget this part of patent law, the encouragement towards innovation was to encourage people to share and build on a communal set of ideas. The temporary monopoly on ideas was the carrot to get people to register their ideas in a central location (patent office) rather than lock ideas behind closed doors and secrecy. Too many people think the carrot of the temporary monopoly was the point of…

Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Both patents and copyright are failed experiments. They weren't meant to 'benefit creators' or 'guarantee an income', and they cannot take that role in a healthy society.

A big difference that can make it reasonable to have long or even infinite copyright terms is that copyright works are the creations of people's minds, not discoveries about nature. Somebody else creating something doesn't prevent you from creating your own thing that's just as good, or even the same thing if you can show you did it independently. But somebody else patenting a method for compressing video does prevent you from independently creating and selling your own video compression method if it happens to work the same way. Maybe that's the best way to compress video and the world would be denied it as long as the patent remains valid.

So nobody really needs to use other people's copyright works. Unlike patented ideas, you can always create your own instead. Or course, sometimes it's expensive and feels like a waste of effort reproducing what's already been done, but it's still not a restriction on doing your own thing the way patents are.

The way I see property ownership is that it's like a store of human labor. When you do work, you might get money from it, you might get a physical object from it (I made a table, now I own that table), or you might get a copyright work from it. All of these things can hold the value of the work you did and can be used to trade for other things. I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that in a fair world, the people who did that work can keep the stored value they created as long as the market is willing to trade things for it. In the case of computer software, some value is lost whenever somebody uses your work, since you're not able to sell it to them anymore. Value is also lost if the the demand falls (obsolete software) but that's the risk of investing your labor in something with an uncertain lifetime, just as the value of a table is lost if fashions change and people want steel tables instead of wood.

Some copyright work has value and that's why people want to copy it, so they can gain that value for themselves at the expense of the copyright holder. But wouldn't it be more fair to make your own, instead of siphoning value out of other people's work without compensating them?

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#136

Post by Asbostos »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #120
joepie91_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Both patents and copyright are failed experiments. They weren't meant to 'benefit creators' or 'guarantee an income', and they cannot take that role in a healthy society.

Copyright has succeeded a thousand times more than its failed. It's pretty great for the most part. It enables a vast, vast number of jobs and new creations. It could certainly be better. But I'd much rather have what copyright as it exists today than for it to not exist at all. And don't forget that GPL is only enforceable due to copyright law.

Good point about GPL. Some people advocate for much shorter copyright terms, just enough to make it worthwhile creating the work, like say 20 years. But that would push some GPL software into the public domain, thus damaging the GPL ecosystem by allowing commercial competitors to use the same code.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#137

Post by Asbostos »

deelowe wrote: post #124
rayiner wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence showing the existence of natural law?

Natural laws are laws that any rational nation would arrive at... well, naturally. Killing is bad, so is stealing, etc... These are natural laws. Anyone capable of rational thought can see how these things would ultimately be bad for any society. The others are laws that a nation creates as a result of specifics surrounding itself. Patents are one such example. These exist solely to spur the sharing of ideas by encou…

Even forbidding killing isn't a natural law. In many societies it has been legal to kill slaves, animals, foreigners, gays, people who break the artificial laws, etc. So killing is often seen as good for society. No laws of property ownership, right to life, right to freedom, etc are natural. They're just things that some societies, sometimes have decided are worth restricting.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#138

Post by ken47 »

Asbostos wrote: post #137
deelowe wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural laws are laws that any rational nation would arrive at... well, naturally. Killing is bad, so is stealing, etc... These are natural laws. Anyone capable of rational thought can see how these things would ultimately be bad for any society. The others are laws that a nation creates as a result of specifics surrounding itself. Patents are one such example. These exist solely to spur the sharing of ideas by encou…

Even forbidding killing isn't a natural law. In many societies it has been legal to kill slaves, animals, foreigners, gays, people who break the artificial laws, etc. So killing is often seen as good for society. No laws of property ownership, right to life, right to freedom, etc are natural. They're just things that some societies, sometimes have decided are worth restricting.

To quote the parent to your comment: "Natural laws are laws that any rational nation would arrive at..."

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#139

Post by ken47 »

TheCondor wrote: post #122
mikekchar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "crummy patents" and "having patents at all" are very much intertwined. The problem is the bit about obviousness to someone skilled in the art. Even though I am a programmer, I know nothing at all about video codecs, so nothing seems obvious at all. But to someone skilled at making codecs, it's a different matter. I remember very clearly when Ogg Theora was being developed the difficulty they had in choosing a te…

You can program it, you can use it. You might have trouble distributing it or selling it. Is it better to patent something and tell the whole world how to do it? Or is it better to just keep it secret? It seems like some refinements to when you can sue might be in order, specifically, I might outlaw suing if you don't market an implementation of your own; that radically changes the value of a lot of property though.

"Is it better to patent something and tell the whole world how to do it? Or is it better to just keep it secret?"

That's quite the false dichotomy.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#140

Post by ken47 »

happyscrappy wrote: post #73
smithkl42 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. As Thomas Jefferson (correctly) described patents, they're a part of positive law, not natural law. In other words, their only justification is pragmatic, not moral. You can't "own" an idea the way that you can own a couch or a car. We allow for (temporary) patent protection because it's supposed to encourage innovation and help our economy. If it doesn't - and it's clearly reached the point where it hinders ra…

Tesla(edit:SpaceX) is not bothering to file patents because it is just a blueprint for countries like China who quickly build knockoffs on someone else's R+D dime.

Do you have any source for this grand claim?
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