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Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

leonardo.chiariglione.org

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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#61

Post by scotty79 »

cornholio wrote: post #44
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…

That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties. The incentive being that you will be left out of the pool, the other members will work around your patents while not licensing their own patents to you, so your own IP…

Patent pools exist to make infeasible system look not so infeasible so people won't recoginize how it's stifling innovation and abolish it.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#62

Post by strogonoff »

badsectoracula wrote: post #51
mike_hearn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Without IP protections that allow copyleft to exist arguably there would be no FOSS. When anything you publish can be leveraged and expropriated by Microsoft et al. without them being obligated to contribute back or even credit you, you are just an unpaid ghost engineer for big tech.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#64

Post by rs186 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #29
thinkingQueen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even more. You need a lot of them. JVET has an attendance of about 350 such engineers each meeting (four times a year). Not to mention the computer clusters to run all the coding sims, thousands and thousands of CPUs are needed per research team. People who are outside the video coding industry do not un…

> Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even more. You need a lot of them. How about governments? Radar, Laser, Microwaves - all offshoots of US military R&D. There's nothing stopping either the US or European governments from stepping up and funding academic progress again.

Yeah, counting on governments to develop codecs optimized for fast evolving applications for web and live streaming is a great idea.

If we did that we would probably be stuck with low-bitrate 720p videos on YouTube.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#65

Post by lightedman »

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"

No, just no. We've had free community codec packs for years before Google even existed. Anyone remember CCCP?

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#66

Post by TiredOfLife »

jbverschoor wrote: post #3
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.

Enough codecs out there. Just no adoption.

Because every codec has 3+ different patent pools wanting rent. Each with different terms.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#67

Post by chisleu »

oblio wrote: post #39
Retr0id wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI and data compression are the same problem, rephrased.

Which makes Silicon Valley, the TV show, even funnier.

holy shit it does. The scene with him inventing the new compression algorithm basically foreshadowed the gooning to follow local LLM availability.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#68

Post by tsimionescu »

badsectoracula wrote: post #51
mike_hearn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 browsers are an interesting case. Neither Chrome nor Edge are really open source, despite Chromium being so, and they are both funded by advertising and marketing money from huge corporations. Safari is of course closed source. And Firefox is an increasingly tiny runner-up. So I don't know if I'd really count Chromium as a FLOSS success story.

Overall, I don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for. What has generally happened is that companies building software have realized that there is a lot of value to be found in treating FLOSS software as a kind of barter agreement between companies, where maybe Microsoft helps improve Linux for the benefit of all, but in turn it gets to use, say, Google's efforts on Chromium, and so on. The fact that other companies then get to mooch off of these big collaborations doesn't really matter compared to getting rid of the hassle of actually setting up explicit agreements with so many others.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#69

Post by fidotron »

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.

The fact h264 and h265 are known by those terms is key to the other part of the equation: the ITU Video Coding Experts Group has become the dominant forum for setting standards going back to at least 2005.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#70

Post by rwmj »

raverbashing wrote: post #28
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…

These are bad comparisons The question is more, "who would write the HTTP spec?" except instead of sending text back and forth you need experts in compression, visual perception, video formats, etc

Did TBL need to patent the HTTP spec?
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