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Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

leonardo.chiariglione.org

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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#101

Post by cxr »

mike_hearn wrote: post #4
wheybags wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.

Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive. Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy. Plus free codecs were often built by acquiring companies that had previously been using IP licensing as a business model rather than from-scratch development.

> Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born

The release of VP3 as open source predates Google's later acquisition of On2 (2010) by nearly a decade.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#102

Post by _alternator_ »

tsimionescu wrote: post #68
badsectoracula wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.

This is still the argument for software copyright. And I think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little successful consumer software. Outside of browsers, Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google Docs, or Photoshop. The browser…

The value of OSS is estimated at about $9 trillion dollars. That’s more valuable than any company on earth.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#103

Post by zoeysmithe »

mike_hearn wrote: post #4
wheybags wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.

Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive. Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy. Plus free codecs were often built by acquiring companies that had previously been using IP licensing as a business model rather than from-scratch development.

This is impossible to know. Not that long ago something like Linux would have sounded like a madman's dream to someone with your perspective. It turns out great innovations happen outside the capitalist for-profit context and denying that is very questionable. If anything, those kinds of setups often hinder innovation. How much better would linux be if it was mired in endless licensing agreements, per monthly rates, had a board full of fortune 500 types, and billed each user a patent fee? Or any form of profit incentive 'business logic'?

If that stuff worked better, linux would have failed entirely, instead near everyone interfaces with a linux machine probably hundreds if not thousands of times a day in some form. Maybe millions if we consider how complex just accessing internet services is and the many servers, routers, mirrors, proxies, etc one encounters in just a trivial app refresh. If not linux, then the open mach/bsd derivatives ios uses.

Then looking even previous to the ascent of linux, we had all manner of free/open stuff informally in the 70s and 80s. Shareware, open culture, etc that led to today where this entire medium only exists because of open standards and open source and volunteering.

Software patents are net loss for society. For profit systems are less efficient than open non-profit systems. No 'middle-man' system is better than a system that goes out of its way to eliminate the middle-man rent-seeker.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#104

Post by phkahler »

thinkingQueen wrote: post #72
ghm2199 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development is slow and expensive?

It’s a bit like developing an F1 car. Or a cutting edge airplane. Lots of small optimizations that have to work together. Sometimes big new ideas emerge but those are rare. Until the new codec comes to together all those small optimizations aren’t really worth much, so it’s a long term research project with potentially zero return on investement. And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I…

>> And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isn’t viewed very favorably by most.

Codecs are like infrastructure not products. From cameras to servers to iPhones, they all have to use the same codecs to interoperate. If someone comes along with a small optimization it's hard enough to deploy that across the industry. If it's patented you've got another obstacle: nobody wants to pay the incremental cost for a small improvement (it's not even incremental cost once you've got free codecs, it's a complete hassle).

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#105

Post by sitkack »

mike_hearn wrote: post #41
pornel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes codec development expensive. In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult, because most computers weren't capable of encoding video, and the field was in its infancy. However, by the end of '00s computers were fast enough for anybody to do video encoding R&D, and there was a ton of research to build upon. At that point MPEG's role changed from b…

IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents. The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocum…

You continue to make the same unsubstantiated claims about codecs being hard and expensive. These same tropes were said about every other field, and even if true, we have tens of thousands of folks that would like to participate, but are locked out due to broken IP law.

The firewall of patents exist precisely because digital video is a way to shakedown the route media would have to travel to get to the end user.

Codecs are not, "harder than" compilers, yet the field of compilers was blown completely open by GCC. Capital didn't see the market opportunity because there wasn't the same possibility of being a gatekeeper for so much attention and money.

The patents aren't because it is difficult, the patents are there because they can extract money from the revenue streams.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#106

Post by sitkack »

tsimionescu wrote: post #68
badsectoracula wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.

This is still the argument for software copyright. And I think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little successful consumer software. Outside of browsers, Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google Docs, or Photoshop. The browser…

> don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for

The entire internet, end to end, runs on FLOSS.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#107

Post by breve »

mike_hearn wrote: post #46
rwmj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would write a web server? Who would write Curl? Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year? People don't understand that these companies have huge R&D budgets! (The answer is that most of the work would be done by companies who have an interest in video distribution - eg. Google - but don't profit directly by selling…

Google funding free stuff is not a real social mechanism. It's not something you can point to and say that's how society should work in general. Our industry has come to take Google's enormous corporate generosity for granted, but there was zero need for it to be as helpful to open computing as it has been. It would have been just as successful with YouTube if Chrome was entirely closed source and they paid for video…

> Google funding free stuff is not a real social mechanism.

It's not a social mechanism. And it's not generosity.

Google pushes huge amounts of video and audio through YouTube. It's in Google's direct financial interest to have better video and audio codecs implemented and deployed in as many browsers and devices as possible. It reduces Google's costs.

Royalty-free video and audio codecs makes that implementation and deployment more likely in more places.

> Patent pools aren't perfect

They are a long way from perfect. Patent pools will contact you and say, "That's a nice codec you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."

Three different patent pools are trying to collect licencing fees for AV1:

https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programmes/audio-and-video-...

https://accessadvance.com/licensing-programs/vdp-pool/

https://www.avanci.com/video/

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#108

Post by breve »

zappb wrote: post #58
tomrod wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free codecs have been available a long time, surely, as we could install them in Linux distributions in 2005 or earlier? (I know nothing about the legal side of all this, just remembering the time period of Ubuntu circa 2005-2008).

Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues in places that enforce software patents.

AV1, VP9, and Opus are used on YouTube and Netflix right now.

It's hard to get more mainstream than YouTube and Netflix.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#109

Post by scott_w »

notpushkin wrote: post #77
zappb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues in places that enforce software patents.

> which never got wide support Source? I’ve seen Vorbis used in a whole bunch of places. Notably, Spotify only used Vorbis for a while (still does, but also includes AAC now, for Apple platforms I think).

Pre-Spotify, MP3 players would usually only ship with MP3 support (thus the name), so people would only rip to MP3. Ask any millennial and most of them will never have heard of Ogg.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#110

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #86
scotty79 wrote: post #63

I think if IP rights holders were mandated to pay property tax it would make the system much healthier.

Wouldn’t that only help the “big guys” who can afford to pay the tax?

Presumably the tax would be based on some estimated value of the property, and affordability would therefore scale.
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