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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

#161

Post by dabinat »

jakevoytko wrote: post #122
nemomarx wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2017 - https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en Although I don't see a lot of other sites using it. You'd think Shopify would?

I worked at Etsy when it expired and the execs got this question a lot. The TL;DR is that the expected outcome is that it massively increases the support burden (wait I didn't mean to click that; wait I actually need to send it to another address; wait I didn't realize shipping was a hundred dollars) without really enabling more sales. So it was a neat idea and worth trying when ecommerce was new, but now we know eno…

I always thought the physical buttons Amazon used to offer were interesting. The idea is that if you’re at an office and you have reams of paper stored near the printer, you put a button next to them. Then whoever grabs the last one hits the button and it automatically orders more. But I’d imagine they discontinued them precisely for the reasons you describe.

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

#162

Post by oconnor663 »

unfitted2545 wrote: post #2

Are patents a necessary evil?

I don't know anything about pharma, but having worked in tech and had my share of patent lawyer meetings, it sure doesn't seem like software patents are necessary at all. That said, a patent system has a lot of free parameters that you can dial to reduce the cost. At the silly limit, if patents were only good for 24 hours, the cost to society would be ~zero (though also the benefit would be zero), so it's hard to call that "evil" in the sense of definitely causing a lot of harm. The question becomes whether/when you can set all the free parameters to something worth having.

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

#163

Post by WalterBright »

close04 wrote: post #105
WalterBright wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese switched from communism to free markets. Prosperity resulted.

> switched from communism to free markets Free markets are a component of capitalism just as they are a component of market socialism. China is a planned economy which stands in contrast to a market economy. But China has taken bits and pieces from many systems to create something that works for them, a hybrid that's probably specific to China alone. It's just capitalist enough to be able to interface with big wallet…

Compare China today with China of the Cultural Revolution.

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

#164

Post by Dylan16807 »

daneel_w wrote: post #157
Dylan16807 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's no such thing as a codec that looks good or bad in an absolute sense. 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 pro…

I should have added "general purpose". I know there are restrained encoders for specific situations. Can you list a few of your examples for video? And I don't understand the other example you did mention, isn't vorbis more than enough at high bitrate?

4:2:0 is just fine for video. It is not a heavy penalty. It's OK for you to be rough about this. More seriously, if it's good enough for bluray and UHD bluray then it's fine.

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

#165

Post by doublerabbit »

doubled112 wrote: post #147
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't VCDs do the same thing? IIRC the Sega Saturn could play them.

I recall that full length movies on VCD were usually two discs to get decent quality. Not needing to get up and switch discs because you could use divx or xvid instead was a real life improvement.

And thats another reason why you had two CD drives in tower cases. My 667mhz AMD-K7 had two CD drives, insert both VCDs and nearly seamless watch a movie.

There was the part where you had to double click the media player to make it full screen again however pretty wholesome for its time.

Nowadays, it's just not the same and Ai isn't nostalgic at all.

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

#166

Post by SpecialistK »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #142
robertlagrant wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was amazing being able to fit a full length movie on a CD-ROM though.

Didn't VCDs do the same thing? IIRC the Sega Saturn could play them.

The stock Saturn needed a VCD expansion card to play them, but some of the Japanese-only models like the Hitachi HiSaturn had it built in.

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

#167

Post by robocat »

Brendinooo wrote: post #94
robocat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the stated purpose of a patent. The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that. I wonder how much of ADSL's advantage is due to trade secrets (spread across many vendors) versus how much has been published as patents.

>The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that I'm not sure if that's true, or if it's more that 1) we hear more about the more egregious stuff and/or 2) something was lost in translation with that stated purpose when the world went digital.

Patents are not discussed as inventions any more.

Other aspects now matter: defensive patents, patent pools, patent trolls, patent portfolios, etc.

Triple damages made a farce of patents as dissemination of invention.

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

#168

Post by 100percentjake »

SoMomentary wrote: post #130
Symmetry wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent making Lenovo's Trackpoints better than imitators (US5570111A) expired back in 2020 but everybody keeps making touchpad-only laptops. :/

I'm unfortunately really unimpressed with the Trackpoints coming out of Lenovo today. I have a brand new ThinkPad that suffers from drift everyday, so it's easy for me to see why other companies aren't including Trackpoints on their products.

Much less "today", I have horrible chronic drift problems with my 2019-era X1 Gen 7, which is super disappointing.

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

#169

Post by Certhas »

goodcanadian wrote: post #108
Certhas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably it's an "international patent" filed in Brazil. You don't have to file your patent in every jurisdiction. There have been treaties for recognising each others intellectual property rights since the late 19th century and Brazil has been part of these from the start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...

So, I recently learned about this from my company's patent lawyers. Patents only give protection in countries where they are filed. So, you can not create a product in Brazil that violates a Brazilian patent. And, you cannot import a product into Brazil that violates that patent. But, there is nothing stopping you from making that product in the US and selling it to Americans. The whole treaty business essentially me…

I didn't realize that, thanks! After looking at Wikipedia for a bit it seems there are two phases under the PCT, an international phase that is sort of like the main part of a patent application, and then the national phase that actually creates the patents in each region/nation based on the first phase. The first phase is like what I had in mind: You file once in one country but the results of this filing apply everywhere.

So as I understand it you don't have to do the full process everywhere, but you have to actively register everywhere where you want protections. And there is no automatism to the second step(?)

https://www.wipo.int/en/web/pct-system/faqs/faqs

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

#170

Post by robocat »

WalterBright wrote: post #110
PowerElectronix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see it, fully voluntary socislism where people share and cooperate because they just feel like it, works exceedingly well. It also naturally regulates itself as people will just abandon stuff that looks iffy and work extra on stuff that is well run, fair, etc When you force people to pitch, share, cooperate, etc, things start to don't work out so well and you start getting people that takes advantage of a system…

Free markets are based on voluntary cooperation. Socialism is coercive cooperation.

Ideal socialism is voluntary, just like ideal free markets.

I wonder whether your axiomatic belief is that we should all have freedom? Therefore you love the idea of free markets? I wonder if some of your "free market" comments would be better written in terms of freedom rather than economics.

Game theory and evolutionary stable strategies show the issues of cooperation versus defection.

Voluntary cooperation fails because power is required to enforce fairness/contracts and then the powerful can defect. That is independent of socialism or free markets.

Also authoritarianism and socialism are different things, even if history shows correlation. Socialism is a deeply tarred word, with radical differences in meaning (approximately equal to communism for many, or democracy for others).

If authoritarianism is a stable outcome, then it can be an outcome of free markets too.

Re your other thread: calling China a free market seems extremely odd, and basing any argument on that 'fact' is even odder. Edit: perhaps "Socialism is coercive cooperation" is similarly nonsensical.

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