151–160 of 186 posts
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?!?
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…
this is a partial misconception, at least in the US
the difference between then and now isn't that the patent law was majorly improved or that patent offices better apply the theoretic bars for quality, intuitiveness, etc. (actually many countries still measure their patent offices by nr. patents granted, setting very bad insensitives.)
the actual difference is a small number of concerns own such a shitload of "unreasonable" patents that they could more or less nuke the whole economy and decided its best for them to put them into a pool and not touch them
this is pretty much a ticking time bomb
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Sure, things within the discipline of computing can be patented, but imagine if somebody just patented the entire discipline of computing . Somehow 1 click buy doesn't quite feel like it's in the same category as humanity conquering the skies.
They didn't patent the equivalent, the entire discipline of flying . They patented "angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes"
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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…
"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." That's the fault of your decoder; I never had that problem playing DivX or XviD videos in VLC.
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...
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The wright brothers patent was not on wing warping, it was on controlling a vehicle in the air. In short the Wright brothers did not invent the aeroplane they invented how to control a aeroplane. https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Sh... "We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations o…
I don't think patent law should be concerned with what inventors "deserve" in some moral sense. I think their purpose should be socially practical. The socially practical effect of working patent law is that it incentivizes inventors to publicly document their inventions by offering limited exclusive rights to the invention. To that end, an overly broad claim to hypothetical inventions which are not actually document…
"Deserve" in itself is a meaningless word, a tribal signal. It's interesting to figure out what different people actually mean by "deserve" when they say it (followed the procedure, fulfilled the agreement, expended a sufficient amount of effort, suffered, were responsible in some way for its existence, is alive, has not taken from others, is loved) but there's nothing really there to base anything on. It's a political word.
The real world equivalent is "is entitled to."
edit: it doesn't help that the philosophical area that focuses on what people "deserve" is called "desert." It's one of the cases where where English sorely needs Spanish-style accent markers. "Desért."
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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.
There are plenty of examples of both awful codecs (software; encoders) and of digital audio/video standards (e.g. Vorbis and MPEG-4 ASP) suffering from material limitations.
> If you gave DVD levels of bits-per-pixel to MPEG-4 ASP you could get something that looks nearly perfect.
No. Not even if the source is encoded by XviD. Not all problems can be solved by throwing higher bitrate at it. The ASP only supports 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which is the largest of several shortcomings contributing to the limited quality you can achieve with ASP video material.
People on at least an intermediate knowledge level of digital video know what a damning problem 4:2:0 subsampling is and how heavy a penalty it incurs on color and clarity. Your comments mostly hold a suggestion that you kinda have some rough idea about digital video. And that's OK.
MPEG-4 SSTP is a very different matter, but that's not what DivX and XviD encodes.
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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…
It was amazing being able to fit a full length movie on a CD-ROM though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
At 1024x768, compared to my Nokia 14" CRT TV it looked good enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think patent law should be concerned with what inventors "deserve" in some moral sense. I think their purpose should be socially practical. The socially practical effect of working patent law is that it incentivizes inventors to publicly document their inventions by offering limited exclusive rights to the invention. To that end, an overly broad claim to hypothetical inventions which are not actually document…
> I don't think patent law should be concerned with what inventors "deserve" in some moral sense. "Deserve" in itself is a meaningless word, a tribal signal. It's interesting to figure out what different people actually mean by "deserve" when they say it (followed the procedure, fulfilled the agreement, expended a sufficient amount of effort, suffered, were responsible in some way for its existence, is alive, has not…