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A comment on MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video Codec. Parent comment

Re:MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video... by orangecat on Friday February 11, 2011 @12:17PM (#2207201)
you're essentially forced by the nature of video and the desire to compress to recognize features of images that exist in multiple frames and then encode based on them

Which is exactly why such methods should not be patentable. Do you really think the VP8 guys had no idea how to do that until they read the H.264 patent? Of course not; it's a strategy that's obvious to skilled engineers, and granting a monopoly to the first entity to file a patent creates huge market inefficiencies and reduced innovation.

things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.

What did Android "copy"? An interface with a grid of icons?

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Re:MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video... by highpass on Friday February 11, 2011 @01:13PM (#2207467)
"What did Android "copy"? An interface with a grid of icons?"

In layman terms, yes. You might argue Android copied it from Apple who copied it from Win Mobile who copied it from Windows who copied it from Apple who bought it off Parc. But that would be annoying to read.

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