Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to patent Polish coding concept

Re:Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to paten... by justonepost on Sunday August 20, 2017 @02:19PM (#15059558)

Yeah, that's always tricky, but you are still missing the point. It's not using it for video they have to prove is non obvious but how they are using it for video. Given the elite mathematical skills you'll need to understand all of this I suspect they'll be able to protect it.

Good reference on this patent:

https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor...

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Re:Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to paten... by thechao on Sunday August 20, 2017 @02:25PM (#15059580)

The genius of ANS is that it isn't a difficult concept to understand. It's a cleverly designed look-up-table. The only really difficult part is the proof of certain parts of the codec window.

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Re:Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to paten... by cyphar on Sunday August 20, 2017 @02:33PM (#15059618)

But is it difficult to understand for a patent clerk, with a massive time crunch and likely not-incredibly-deep knowledge about information theory? Software patents are dangerous for many reasons, but the fact that they're so easy to get is quite worrying.

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Re:Poland's oldest university denies Google's right to paten... by cma on Sunday August 20, 2017 @03:46PM (#15059942)

https://www.google.com/patents/US20170164007

Claim one: none of the transform block stuff etc. is new. The only thing added is:

> processing a binary flag or bit using the Boolean ANS decoder to generate an output value for the binary flag or bit using the ANS state; and

>processing a token using the symbol ANS decoder to generate an output value for the token using the ANS state;

That's just slotting existing ANS implementation as a module. Other entropy encoders were used in that exact stage prior to this.

The other claims 2-8 just add on ANS optimizations that aren't video specific whatsoever. Things including using a bytestream instead of a bitstream.

If any of those were a significant invention by the filee (I'm not going to rule that out, someone please chime in if there was one), why didn't they also patent their application to the entropy encoding stage of image encoding? Or the entropy encoding stage of all sorts of other compression applications?

I haven't read through all the others below claim 8, they look similar with the main variation being using instructions stored in "non-transitory memory" (hardware decoders), but there might be something more video-specific there.

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