[HN Gopher] The future of innovation has patent-free standards
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The future of innovation has patent-free standards
Author : reedciccio
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-07-12 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.opensource.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.opensource.org)
| acd wrote:
| Predict the following, higher inflation will cause central banks
| to raise interest rates to fight inflation. Higher interest rates
| will stop easy central bank and founder exit money flow to fund
| capital for startups. Startups without easy access to new rounds
| of capital will have to lay of staff.
|
| Engineers from previous startups will cause a resurge in
| opensource projects. Stable companies with solid profit track
| records will become popular to work for. As will working as own
| consultants freelancers writing open source.
|
| Patent free standards, open source and open hardware will become
| very popular. Trends being driven by more environmentally aware
| consumers and credit access.
| phh wrote:
| I think there is some middle ground to find. As of right now,
| looking at audio codecs on Play Store, there is some status quo
| which is IMO good (but it requires to actually be written
| somewhere, otherwise shit will happen): Opensource applications
| that are not shipped with devices but are available "on the
| internet", or some app store aren't threatened by patents holder.
|
| (Source: I'm a contributor of opensource NOVA Video Player, which
| was previously closed-source Archos Video Player)
|
| As a company, I think that paying for standards is fair, but it
| must be reasonable. Reasonable implies 1. clear rules which never
| blocks innovation [1][1b] 2. reasonable fee [2], 3. freedom of
| using whichever implementation of that standard I want, 4. If fee
| has been paid on HW, then any SW on that HW is allowed to use
| that license
|
| [1] Some vendors will sell their licenses exclusively on
| hardware, so if you sell an app, you're screwed
|
| [1b] Some vendors will require you to make different SKUs whether
| you enable it or not. What if user need to enable it later?
|
| [2] Sisvel's AV1 license is 15c, which is imo fair for a 200$ HW,
| but not for a 1$ ad-less video app. That being said, I have no
| idea how to actually make it fair. (Note that as I understand it,
| Sisvel's AV1 license is for HW, not SW, no idea how it works for
| SW)
| kragen wrote:
| > _I think there is some middle ground to find._
|
| Well, I agree.
|
| On one extreme, we have the clearly unreasonable position that
| popular audio and video codecs can only be implemented by
| proprietary software, so that open-source software can never
| implement them, and the majority of our audiovisual culture
| goes down the memory hole when that proprietary software stops
| working.
|
| On the other extreme, we have the clearly unreasonable position
| that when a patent office grants a patent on an audio or video
| codec, we should kill the patent examiner and inventors,
| vaporize the country's capital and large cities with a
| thermonuclear holocaust, and hunt down and kill any relatives
| of the inventors and patent examiner who survive elsewhere,
| flaying them and hanging them upside down from gas-station
| awnings to rot as a warning to others.
|
| This is unreasonable because, among other things, the inventors
| may have had no way to know that the patent would ultimately
| read on software implementations. Also, though it's
| understandable to want to make an exception in this case, the
| Geneva Conventions strictly prohibit collective punishment.
|
| As a middle ground, I suggest that we merely criminalize
| attempts to enforce patents against software of any kind,
| following the model of SLAPP laws. We should levy fines as a
| percentage of the plaintiff's revenues and disbar the lawyers
| who filed the lawsuits, with six months to a year of prison
| time for the officers of the company, or for an individual if
| the plaintiff is an individual.
|
| By contrast, your extremist proposal of allowing patentholders
| to block software implementations of international standards
| unless they are paid, that is clearly absurd, as it imposes a
| completely unreasonable burden on the open-source maintainers
| who are the backbone of modern software.
| phh wrote:
| > By contrast, your extremist proposal of allowing
| patentholders to block software implementations of
| international standards unless they are paid, that is clearly
| absurd, as it imposes a completely unreasonable burden on the
| open-source maintainers who are the backbone of modern
| software.
|
| My extremist proposal, where I say in the first line that
| opensource maintainers should be free of any patent
| requirement?
| est31 wrote:
| > Sisvel's AV1 license is 15c, which is imo fair for a 200$ HW,
| but not for a 1$ ad-less video app.
|
| Yeah that's the problem. There is a multitude of business
| models, and some vendors give away their software for free
| completely. E.g. Mozilla ships their software to >200 monthly
| active users for free and only very weakly monetizes it. That
| means slightly over 2 USD of revenue per user in 2020. For
| comparison, Meta had 40 USD in 2021.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Sisvel's AV1 license is 15c, which is imo fair for a 200$ HW,
| but not for a 1$ ad-less video app.
|
| I'd say that this is perfectly fair (as long as everybody pays
| the same), and it's a problem for the creator of the $1 app to
| sort out. The patent owner is explicitly disallowing the usage
| of his patent in low-value products, but there isn't anything
| wrong with this. Either somebody will make a killing selling a
| $5 app with it, or nobody will care about his standard.
| (Relatedly, you don't have a right to get the costs of your app
| to adjust around any price you want.)
|
| What is definitively not fair:
|
| 1 - Changing the price between licensees;
|
| 2 - Varying the price with product price, revenue, or any other
| metric;
|
| 3 - Embedding the license with any term that isn't payment from
| one side, license from the other.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| I always had the impression that AV1 is royalty-free. Seems I
| was mistaken.
| noname120 wrote:
| AV1 itself is royalty-free but it relies on other patents
| which aren't. Sisvel sells a license bundle of 1000+
| patents[1] (called a "patent pool") that enables you to use
| AV1 without an army of lawyers.
|
| [1] https://www.sisvel.com/images/documents/Video-Coding-
| Platfor...
| kache_ wrote:
| Patent law is going to get really ridiculous with all this AI IP
| generation
|
| The general ethos of most hacker SWEs I know building cool shit
| is: just build, if I get sued, it's a speeding ticket (That some
| VC will give me money to hire some lawyers to deal with).
| Nasrudith wrote:
| With standards the question is "Do you really want the expense
| and hassle of a patent?" The answer is of course hell no. If you
| make a patented standard now you have two standards.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Is this provoked by the recent investigation by the EU into
| AOM?[0] The biggest source of patent declarations for ISO is
| MPEG; video standards are the one part of software development
| where you really, really do need to worry about paying patent
| license fees.
|
| Everywhere else, the only thing software developers are worried
| about are patent trolls, who usually don't have enforceable
| patents, and rely on the cost of litigation alone as a way to
| extract licensing fees. Oddly enough, video standards _used_ to
| be relatively free of this nonsense; but the actual patent
| revenues have been falling for a long time now, so all the patent
| owners are getting antsy and forming overlapping pools to try and
| make implementers pay more for the same patents.
|
| There's also the fact that ISO charges to purchase copies of
| their standards, but that only matters for people who want
| certifications. The actual standards aren't encumbered by any
| copyright ISO might hold on the document.
|
| [0] For context: The EU competition regulators believe AOM may
| have bullied people into royalty-free licensing. This could
| either be read as "Google screwed up their legal research" or the
| EU deciding that reciprocal royalty-free patent licensing itself
| needs to die.
| phh wrote:
| > [0] For context: The EU competition regulators believe AOM
| may have bullied people into royalty-free licensing. This could
| either be read as "Google screwed up their legal research" or
| the EU deciding that reciprocal royalty-free patent licensing
| itself needs to die.
|
| Sounds like you're assuming that the issue is with AV1 itself.
| My personal guess is that the issue is rather that some AOM
| company could coerce some patent-owner companies into using
| AV1, and thus "relinquishing their patents".
|
| Stupid obviously unreal example: If Apple require iPhone
| resellers to display Apple's advertisement from AV1 codec. Then
| resellers have the choice to either stop selling Apple
| products, or give their patents for free to AOM. If that was
| real, it could be considered an abuse of Apple's dominant
| position.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The issue _would_ be with AV1 itself, because the
| investigation is about standards-essential patents (SEP) and
| the whole point of AV1 is to be royalty-free. If the EU
| decides that AOM violated competition rules to get blanket
| licenses to AV1 SEP, then that would (presumably) wipe away
| the SEP owner 's obligations to reciprocally license those
| patents to new implementers. Then we're right back in the
| same overlapping-patent-pool hell that made H.265 so
| ludicrously expensive to license.
| nynx wrote:
| I absolutely hate to see consortiums patent and license out
| standards. I sort of get it if it's a company patenting it, but a
| consortium should be separate from the business side of it.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >but a consortium should be separate from the business side of
| it
|
| Who then pays for the consortium?
| nynx wrote:
| I don't understand why a consortium would need a lot of
| funding if all it is doing is standardizing something that
| private companies have put together.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| > all it is doing
|
| You mean hold meetings for perhaps hundreds of people many
| times a year, provide marketing, provide offices and a
| point of contact for those interested in the standard, hire
| lawyers to work on legal issues, hire editors to make
| standards well written, entice companies to join your
| standard as opposed to competing standards consortiums via
| using sales people to visit them, handle mailing lists,
| trackers, review cycles, secretarial staff, janitorial
| staff, renting collaborate workspaces for meetings, and on
| and on.....
|
| >that private companies have put together
|
| I think you have misunderstood the process. No single
| company usually makes such a standard, otherwise there
| would be no consortium. You want a consortium to be a
| mostly separate group that obtains input from companies to
| make a standard. Companies send members to sit in on
| meetings to craft or guide or merely be aware of how the
| standard is evolving over time so the company can gain some
| benefit.
|
| Simply google how to start a technical consortium to find
| some of the issues, things you'd need to do, and ways to
| get it all paid for.
|
| Take SMPTE, for example, the Society of Motion Picture and
| Television Engineers, which creates video standards among
| other things. They've published over 800 standards since
| founding in 1916. Check out their website
| https://www.smpte.org/
|
| They have global outreach, including education functions.
| Their staff page shows the major staff and functions -
| those people require offices and support staff. They
| provide market matching to connect groups to each other to
| further their standards - this takes effort and people.
| They have offices in many countries around the world.....
|
| Also in this space are the standardization consortiums
| ATSC, MPEG, JPEG, CCIR, CCITT, and a few others.
|
| So these are not simply copy and paste operations. Making a
| good standard and getting the market to adopt it is a lot
| of work.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The title states that patent-free is the future, but the article
| only says that it _should_ be the future. I don 't see that
| happening, as companies would rather pool their resources and
| make a closed standard (where they each have both a stake and
| some control) than use an open standard where their competitors
| may have zero stake, and the governance is provided by
| essentially whoever shows up and wants to govern.
| randcraw wrote:
| On a more general note, I wonder how much enforcement of patents
| will be rendered moot by two trends: 1) the rise of algorithms
| (which can't be patented) in replacing physical IP, and 2) the
| rising practice internationally of IP theft, esp in China?
|
| AFAIK, China has paid no price (legally) to date for stealing
| tech from others and disregarding patents/copyrights. What does
| that bode for IP enforcement if the #2 economy on Earth largely
| ignores it? Does this suggest we can expect enforcement of IP
| protection to fade everywhere someday soon?
| vkou wrote:
| > AFAIK, China has paid no price (legally) to date for stealing
| tech from others and disregarding patents/copyrights.
|
| If you consider arresting Huawei executives, sanctions against
| that firm, and having their equipment banned/restricted for
| many use cases by a number of western governments to be 'no
| price', then sure, no price has been paid.
|
| We can split hairs as to the steps of the exact chain of
| causality that has lead us to that point, but I'm sure it was a
| factor.
| trasz wrote:
| Huawei _holds_ lots of patents there. It was sanctioned
| because US couldn't compete on market terms, not because of
| alleged "IP theft" - which used to be a normal practice for
| US companies (and government; there are quite a few stories
| of American industrial espionage) until they got ahead.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They are sanctioned because their products are backdoored.
| vkou wrote:
| American products and services are also backdoored, yet
| the EU does not sanction US vendors. It has, however,
| strongly considered banning Huawei.
| trasz wrote:
| If those allegations were true - and even GCHQ admitted
| it was bullshit - then those backdoors would be
| demonstrated, like it was the case with Cisco and
| Juniper.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| > 1) the rise of algorithms (which can't be patented) in
| replacing physical IP
|
| You're assuming there's an inherent limit to ownership. The
| rise of software patents themselves are an expansion of the
| concept of ownership.
|
| If there's gold in them there hills, why would they go unmined?
| See "Are Business Method Patents Going to be Second Class
| Citizens?" for the "everything is ownable and licensable" side
| of the argument.
|
| https://www.goodwinlaw.com/~/media/Files/Publications/Attorn...
| JacobiX wrote:
| > Does this suggest we can expect enforcement of IP protection
| to fade everywhere someday soon?
|
| It could also be the other way around: in order to expand to
| new markets, Chinese companies will be obliged to comply with
| patents/copyrights laws. You can see that for instance Tencent
| and Huawei are AOM members, they can't simply use AV1 without
| license ...
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| same goes for copyright atleast imo. when the revolution comes,
| let's do away with them
| xjay wrote:
| ..and egos, and attribution.
| kube-system wrote:
| Do you want to see what Linux looks like when it's distributed
| as a binary with DRM? Because this is probably the best way to
| achieve that.
|
| "Abolishing copyright" is not the same as "abolishing people
| not wanting to cooperate"
| goodpoint wrote:
| This is correct. Unfortunately most people are pretty naive
| when it comes to the reasons and the history behind copyright
| and patents.
|
| Without any concept of authorship, moral rights and prior art
| we would go back to early 1900: a lot of technology was not
| only secret but even actively obfuscated.
|
| Companies would be secretive and uncooperative and society
| progresses much more slowly.
| errantmind wrote:
| There was nothing slow about society in that period.
| survirtual wrote:
| Patents are a plague on modern society. Early 1900 did not
| have accessible light speed communications like the
| internet. There are billions of people capable of
| understanding complex ideas and generating inventions.
|
| Patents prevent small, underfunded inventors from creating.
| It makes access to innovation exclusively for the rich, who
| have access to the resources necessary to patent new ideas,
| defend their patent, and squash small innovators. It also
| forces underfunded innovators to seek financing and
| relinquish significant IP rights to a viralistic parasite
| providing funding.
|
| They are a tool of control against the intellectual class,
| and a method to slow innovation in order to parasitic
| entities to maximize profits. Rarely do patents in the
| modern day protect small time inventors. Instead, it
| entrenches large scale institutions and enslaves the minds
| generating the intellectual property.
|
| Simultaneously, with millions of brilliant minds around the
| globe, it gives the rich tools to squash inventors
| generating simple concepts in parallel. So many simple
| ideas -- like much of 3d printing, or shadow extrusions, or
| using ML to read road signs -- have been patented to the
| detriment of all.
|
| I could go on all day. Patents are a plague.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > a lot of technology was not only secret but even actively
| obfuscated.
|
| This is exactly the state of things today. It always takes
| significant time for a new technology area to open up and
| improve in transparency, and it's not at all clear that
| copyright and patents can really improve on this.
| kube-system wrote:
| IP rights are an olive branch to creators encouraging
| publishing, they don't force anyone to publish their
| work. Taking away that incentive will result in a
| worsening of the situation, even though there will be a
| nonzero number of people who choose not to publish under
| both scenarios.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > This is exactly the state of things today
|
| Citation needed.
| EliMdoza wrote:
| Go read "Against Intellectual Monopoly". It's free. The
| history of IP law, patents and copyright is quite
| surprising.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/against-
| intellectual-mo...
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