Re:MPEG-2 Patents Have Expired
by kelnos on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @07:57PM
(#16381068)
Not the parent poster, but personally I just don't see the value (to the public) with this model.
Most A/V codec development these days is done at least somewhat out in the open, and there are collaborators between different organizations. The nature of the beast is that you can't release codecs to the public without inherently giving away how it works. Even if you lock things down with NDAs and such, people will reverse-engineer it before too long.
That alone isn't an indictment of patents here (note that drug development suffers from similar issues, at least wrt disclosure), but:
This sort of work will happen regardless of whether or not there are patents covering them (the fact that we have/had things like Vorbis, FLAC, VP8/9, Tarkin, Theora, AV1, etc. is proof of that), so in the end patenting these sorts of things doesn't actually "promote the progress of science and useful arts"; it just encourages rent-seeking behavior. Patent-encumbered codecs out there are not meaningfully better performance-wise than the patent-unencumbered ones (certainly not enough to justify the licensing fees); the patent-encumbered ones are merely better at marketing, so everyone who wants to do anything with video ends up paying a tax for no real benefit.
Most A/V codec development these days is done at least somewhat out in the open, and there are collaborators between different organizations. The nature of the beast is that you can't release codecs to the public without inherently giving away how it works. Even if you lock things down with NDAs and such, people will reverse-engineer it before too long.
That alone isn't an indictment of patents here (note that drug development suffers from similar issues, at least wrt disclosure), but:
This sort of work will happen regardless of whether or not there are patents covering them (the fact that we have/had things like Vorbis, FLAC, VP8/9, Tarkin, Theora, AV1, etc. is proof of that), so in the end patenting these sorts of things doesn't actually "promote the progress of science and useful arts"; it just encourages rent-seeking behavior. Patent-encumbered codecs out there are not meaningfully better performance-wise than the patent-unencumbered ones (certainly not enough to justify the licensing fees); the patent-encumbered ones are merely better at marketing, so everyone who wants to do anything with video ends up paying a tax for no real benefit.