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Comment by dzhiurgis | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.

I've tried to run 4K60 VP9 (and h.265 for that matter) video from youtube on the latest top spec MacBook Pro and it's completely impossible to watch. Transcoded to h.264 and computer barely gets warm.

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Maybe you could rephrase that. How many years of human progress and CO2 emissions have been caused by the uncooperative licensing situation caused by these software patent owners?

Well by that logic we can ask anyone for free stuff and point at CO2. Google is not giving away their data for free, the lend it to you.

> I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.

It would definitely be an interesting way to look at how bad software patents are for our society. It's not Google's fault (though they do participate in this system) that good technology had been locked away only to be used by proprietary software.

Well Google want something for free, why can't I get stuff from Google for free? Like, not rent their data, but actually browse their index properly (remember, verbatim && date search has been removed and it's likely to get even worse).

Not sure what that has to do with a discussion about why Google uses a non-patented codec rather than a patented one. What access Google gives their users is not a factor, and is a non-sequitur.

But also I think you're missing the point of free software if you want to limit usage of free software based on your personal value judgement of a company. That's antithetical to free software.

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