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Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

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Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#21
post #9

Brought to you by the company that fires employees that desire to discuss company diversity programs and bans content on its severs that it deems unethical. Totally not evil.

I stand by their right to dismiss employees that make the company look bad. I also stand by their right to remove content that is might mislead people into doing something that would harm themselves (https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiratard/comments/5vwedb/google...).

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#22
post #9

Brought to you by the company that fires employees that desire to discuss company diversity programs and bans content on its severs that it deems unethical. Totally not evil.

What better slogan if they really planned on being evil.

It is not unlike the Cloudflare banning some crazy right wing website recently and publicly claiming it dangerous for a company to become the online arbiter for speech, while the CEO behind the scenes is sending memos how it was his decision and just something he wanted to do etc.

I think it a pretty common pattern for the perpetrators to claim officially to very much against the things they might be accused of. Some of that might even work at the unconscious level. And I think corporations also have a kind of unconscious mind (all the unwritten rules, culture and hidden incentives).

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#23
post #6

I'm not understanding how Google and employees is claiming to be the original inventor here. Each inventor must sign an oath or declaration that includes certain statements required by law and the USPTO rules, including the statement that he or she believes himself or herself to be the original inventor or an original joint inventor of a claimed invention in the application and the statement that the application was…

The patent application clearly contains concepts from their discussion with Duda, which they didn't disclose while applying, but was pointed by ISA reviewer: https://register.epo.org/application?documentId=EZ46ZRSY2014...

ps. hot today reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6uuqcd/google_...

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#24
I stumbled upon this edit war concerning Huffman Coding article on Wikipedia [1], where the ANS algorithm author (Jarek Duda) justifies his edits back in 2007 as a way to "shorten the delay for its [ANS] current wide use in modern compressors, leading to unimaginable world-wide energy and time savings thanks to up to 30x speedup."

Sounds dramatic, but today it seems like he had a point. The other guy (guarding Wikipedia against self promotion) has a point too, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AHuffman_coding

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely they are patenting their use of ANS rather than ANS itself. You can patent anything if you get specific enough. For things like video formats it actually works because it keeps others from creating decoders/encoders.

Applying it to video is one of the most obvious applications and it pretty much just slots in as a module, replacing huffman coding or arithmetic coding.

Yeah, that's always tricky, but you are still missing the point. It's not using it for video they have to prove is non obvious but how they are using it for video. Given the elite mathematical skills you'll need to understand all of this I suspect they'll be able to protect it.

Good reference on this patent:

https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor...

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying it to video is one of the most obvious applications and it pretty much just slots in as a module, replacing huffman coding or arithmetic coding.

Yeah, that's always tricky, but you are still missing the point. It's not using it for video they have to prove is non obvious but how they are using it for video. Given the elite mathematical skills you'll need to understand all of this I suspect they'll be able to protect it. Good reference on this patent: https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor...

The genius of ANS is that it isn't a difficult concept to understand. It's a cleverly designed look-up-table. The only really difficult part is the proof of certain parts of the codec window.

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#28
post #9

Brought to you by the company that fires employees that desire to discuss company diversity programs and bans content on its severs that it deems unethical. Totally not evil.

I stand by their right to dismiss employees that make the company look bad. I also stand by their right to remove content that is might mislead people into doing something that would harm themselves ( https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiratard/comments/5vwedb/google... ).

I assume you believe to have the right to decide what offends you or not. In that case, so do I -- and I find your comment offensive.

But oh wait, you only agree if it benefits you. Otherwise you will protest, am I right?

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#29
It's interesting that arithmetic compression and its variants seem to be a favourite of those looking for something to patent. From the description of ANS, it looks very similar to the QM/Q-coder for JBIG/2, JPEG, and JPEG2000, which was patented by IBM a long time ago (since expired.)

Re: Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

#30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's always tricky, but you are still missing the point. It's not using it for video they have to prove is non obvious but how they are using it for video. Given the elite mathematical skills you'll need to understand all of this I suspect they'll be able to protect it. Good reference on this patent: https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor...

The genius of ANS is that it isn't a difficult concept to understand. It's a cleverly designed look-up-table. The only really difficult part is the proof of certain parts of the codec window.

But is it difficult to understand for a patent clerk, with a massive time crunch and likely not-incredibly-deep knowledge about information theory? Software patents are dangerous for many reasons, but the fact that they're so easy to get is quite worrying.
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