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A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

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Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#111

Post by WalterBright »

benj111 wrote: post #89
WalterBright wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments. The Wrights definitely were in it for the money. The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement. > the scary b…

>For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money. Define socialism. Isn't the collectively owned road outside your property essentially socialism? Would that work better if it were privately owned?

[flagged]

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#112

Post by miguelxpn »

FuturisticLover wrote: post #109

Siemens holding one of the key patents in video codecs surprises me. I am not technically savvy, but I thought telecom infrastructure or direct media companies would hold the most important patents on this.

If I'm not mistaken they had a telecom infrastructure division at one point.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#113

Post by WalterBright »

close04 wrote: post #64
WalterBright wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments. The Wrights definitely were in it for the money. The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement. > the scary b…

> Socialism's track record is pretty bad. There aren't many pure socialist countries like there aren't many (any?) pure capitalist countries. Most of Europe operates in mixed mode, half socialist. Some countries are very bad (and against) at implementing any measures that directly benefit the lower classes (as opposed to the typical capitalist "trickle-down economics") so they vilify anything that has even the fainte…

> Capitalists don't run out of other people's money but they do collect all of it

No, they don't "collect all of it". Musk's trillion dollars was created, it was not "collected".

> which was witty a few decades ago and sounds just ignorant today.

Countries that turn to socialism are always running massive deficits paid for with inflation. American states and cities that lean into socialism are all having major problems with running out of money and raising taxes.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#114

Post by Aurornis »

FuturisticLover wrote: post #109

Siemens holding one of the key patents in video codecs surprises me. I am not technically savvy, but I thought telecom infrastructure or direct media companies would hold the most important patents on this.

Farming patents either via filing them or acquiring them was a big business move in the early 2000s. Even basic business on the internet felt like a patent minefield and there was constant debate about patent trolls and overreach.

It still happens to an extent, but we’ve gotten far enough to be in a place where basic patents have expired so that most basic companies don’t have to think about this stuff as much.

I do not miss the days of having to work with corporate counsel to try to determine if someone’s “system and method for data retrieval over the internet” patent could be construed to cover our basic REST API and then watching as they evaluated the likelihood of a lawsuit or if it was an empty threat designed to extract a settlement.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#116

Post by WalterBright »

benj111 wrote: post #86
WalterBright wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wrights were about 5 years ahead of their time. The Wrights went about it as an R+D project and calculated what the design must be, while the other developers were doing seat-of-the-pants designs which worked about as expected.

Except we don't do wing warping anymore, or take many design cues from the wrights at all. Hard to say they were ahead when they were in an evolutionary dead end.

Wright accomplishments that were crucial to making a working airplane:

1. First propeller theory, which got them a propeller that was 90% efficient rather than the 50% efficiency of contemporary propellers. The theory has only been slightly improved today.

2. First 3 axis control system, copied by everyone else. Yes, ailerons are a better system, but it's the same idea.

3. First aviation engine with a power/weight ration double anyone else's.

4. First research and development project where the problems of flight were identified and then prototypes developed to solve each of the problems.

5. Extensive use of a wind tunnel to determine the optimal cross-section shape of the wing.

6. Use of calculations to determine the size and lift of the wing, and how much power was needed from the engine.

All airplane designs trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, not anybody else's airplane.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#117

Post by Dylan16807 »

daneel_w wrote: post #97
BarryGuff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember DivX fondly Now THAT'S a name I haven't heard in a long time. Yes, DivX was the sh*t back in the day. So good!

With emphasis on shit . Really. I can relate to the rose-tinted memories, but DivX and XviD both encode to MPEG-4 ASP which has a lot of shortcomings that manifestly result in the infamous sludgy green-purple banding artefacts of the time, no matter how good the chosen encoder is. XviD is the better of those two MPEG-4 ASP encoders, but it simply does not look good in an absolute sense, just in a relative sense compa…

There's no such thing as a codec that looks good or bad in an absolute sense. Codecs boil down to a quality versus bitrate curve. And starving them always looks bad.

While the most common kind of artifact will shift between standards, significant artifacts are fundamentally bitrate issues or encoder bugs.

If you gave DVD levels of bits-per-pixel to MPEG-4 ASP you could get something that looks nearly perfect.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#118

Post by dingaling »

childintime wrote: post #43
_carbyau_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A patent was meant to give a solo genius a way to treat their idea as something tangible, at a time when logistics was much slower and the world revolved around the physical. Maybe they try to develop it themselves, maybe they sell the idea to a big corporation that has the resources to implement it. Either way, genius begets profit, and the world gets genius ideas... in theory anyway. But a genuine idea back then ne…

Solo geniuses don't have the money to operate the patent system, it doesn't work for them. All they can do is sell for cheap or else get bogged down. When they invent as an employee they outright don't own it. That's a moral outrage. And that's what the patent system is to individuals. Good luck publishing in Costa Rica. When you're not privileged you're likely to be on the losing end. So what use is it? Better keep…

"Solo geniuses don't have the money to operate the patent system"

Very true, a friend patented a design, that he had developed over a decade, and tried to license it to established players in the astronomy field. They looked at his pitch and just implemented it anyway. Without buckets of money there's little a solo inventor can do.

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#119

Post by jmyeet »

Brendinooo wrote: post #95

What other tech patents did we somewhat resent being patented that are now expired? I'm also thinking about the click wheel; I got one of my kids a knockoff iPod for Christmas last year. Can other e-commerce sites legally "one-click" to purchase like Amazon now?!?

The GIF patent is a big one [1]. It's the entire reason we got PNG as a format.

[1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/lpf/Patents/Gif/Gi...

Re: A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

#120

Post by Zigurd »

unfitted2545 wrote: post #2

Are patents a necessary evil?

Patents are a deal made between innovators and governments. I especially dislike this term "intellectual property" because it tries to turn that deal into a right. That feels benign because the little guy innovator depends on rights. But what really happens is that it turns patents into a sacred object. They're not.

While it would be a bad idea to do so, mere legislation can set the terms of a patent to any length down to zero or out to forever. It's not a right. It's a deal meant to be beneficial to society in return for the government enforcing a limited term monopoly.

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