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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 kenjackson on Friday February 11, 2011 @03:57PM (#2208098)
I've always thought patents were supposed to be detailed enough so that one competent in the field could produce the invention. In SW that is clearly not the case.

I'm not justifying patents. I also think they're generally not useful and destructive. But they are here.

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Re:MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video... by Natsu on Friday February 11, 2011 @04:29PM (#2208211)
I certainly agree with you there. Sadly, the metrics the politicians appear to be using to grade the health of the system are: "amount of money made by licensing patents" and "number of patents granted."

It doesn't take much imagination to see why those are bad metrics for people more concerned with promoting the progress of science and useful arts.

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