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

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.

Sure, a land-grab model, but the frontier was not fair to everybody, and in fact was pretty harmful depending on your politics.

In this case it took a while to figure out the smart thing, and it took 10 minutes to find an application to patent.

I worked for a company that probably infringed on an existing telecom patent that was more or less equivalent to looking in another sock drawer if you can't find a matching sock, but as it was related to "an apparatus or method" for "locating subscriber registry data" it was apparently novel enough to require a patent.

It took me about 1 minute to come up with the solution as an obvious solution to a simple problem so it was clearly just rubbish.

The patentee had about 2 million other patents, so if someone had actually cared we could potentially have infringed on several more patents and run out of money long before we could win.

Especially behind real inventors' back.

You can't just dictate your own distorted ethical vision just because you are too big.

Edit: plus I don't even give a shit if they limit their use of this patent to defend themselves against competitor claims. Clearly even in this limited case this patent still would have (a very good) value, so at least propose the REAL inventor to patent it and sell ultra limited right for that purpose for a few millions. Then this would be kind of ethical.