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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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, your original assumption is incorrect. Depending upon the context, you don't necessarily get to decide what offends you.

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

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes I do. I also have the right to ignore you when you say stupid shit like this, or call you out on it like I am now. You have exactly the same right.

> I also have the right to ignore you

Not if he is your boss and just fired you.

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

#43

(For those interested in data compression, https://encode.ru is very active. This thread covers the rANS patent problems: https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor... )

Please consider not showing that forum to people who are not working in compression. It is a rare beauty that could easily fall into Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#44
post #35

Can anyone explain Google's rationale here? As I understand the US patent system, patent trolls can and do make these sorts of patent filings all the time, and the legitimacy doesn't matter, because their victims can't afford to defend themselves in court. Isn't it irrational not to file patents like these? Or is Google planning to use this patent "offensively?"

Google has never used a patent offensively. Hell even Waymo was more about theft than patents. But HN turns rabid in these situations rather than understanding Google has to do this to prevent trolls from doing it.

>Google has to do this to prevent trolls from doing it.

So you believe that a company as powerful as Google deserves more consolidated power. No, thanks.I will stick with the possibility of getting sued by a troll than handing that power to Google.

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

#46
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.

I think you are correct: ANS is an entropy coding method, so a patent shouldn't be able to claim a new use for encoding some specific type of information [1]. Also, Duda's paper even exemplifies the obvious use case for video compression [2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obvious...

[2] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540

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

#47
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the us has moved to first to file. It could be they are just protecting it from being patented by someone else. Also, until you see the patent app, you don't really know what they are patenting exactly.

...but ffs! The reason is that Google is encouraging their employees to file patents, just as everybody else, since the patent system in regards to software patents is really just a pissing contest - they need patents to hit each other in the heads with, and it doesn't matter if it's obvious implementations of things that people with a common sense will figure out in 10 minutes. In this case it took a while to figure…

But Google doesn't do that. That's worth something, right? It's easy to take the moral high ground, but I wanted to point out how it looks to the quiet objective people reading.

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

#48
post #5

Wow, fuck Google. They really should consider re-adopting "Don't be evil" for PR proposes at the very least. (This isn't too say other companies don't pull the same shit; fuck them all just as much)

Has google ever filed a patent suit against someone other than in defense? What's more is they have purchased licenses to defend public use of formats. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/googl...

If they have to keep growing at the rate the stock market price demands for them they will soon sue other companies to make money.

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

#49
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has google ever filed a patent suit against someone other than in defense? What's more is they have purchased licenses to defend public use of formats. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/googl...

If they have to keep growing at the rate the stock market price demands for them they will soon sue other companies to make money.

We can't possibly know that, and that's one of the worst strategies for long-term profitability.

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

#50
post #46
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.

I think you are correct: ANS is an entropy coding method , so a patent shouldn't be able to claim a new use for encoding some specific type of information [1]. Also, Duda's paper even exemplifies the obvious use case for video compression [2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obvious... [2] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540

Unfortunately, that's not the case, at least as the patent office currently sees things. There's thousands of patents for H.264 and HEVC that amount to "code a certain bitstream symbol with CABAC this certain way".
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