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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Is this model better? When a company develops technology with the purpose of selling the technology, it’s incentives are predictable. But what are the incentives where technology is bankrolled by companies that don’t make money from the technology, but through something else they sell? Facebook is funding these codecs because it helps their business of data mining your personal information. How is that a better state of affairs?

There is no free lunch. At least when the cost of a patent license gets bundled into your Blu-Ray player, you know what you’re paying.

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You could say the same of all Web technologies. Do you actually think it would be better to have software patents and royalties on every Web standard?

For one thing, this would be catastrophic for open source projects (and indeed commercial audio and video codecs have been a huge pain for open source developers and users). Well, you're suggesting that free codecs are bad because they profit Facebook, and you could say the same about open source software, especially those that get contributions from Facebook.

I rather think that advertisers will always pay money to advertise, and when some of that money goes to developing open and free technologies that's a good thing.

There are many free lunches. You can get a universally supported free video codec to use for your hobby project or for your company's product, without having a Facebook account. It is always possible to find hidden costs in free products, so what? You can do the same for paid-for products. The idea that a Blu-Ray player won't spy on you because the manufacturer paid some royalties is... flawed.

> You could say the same of all Web technologies.

I don’t think CERN was trying to monetize anything. To the extent that web technologies today are driven by companies like Google, then maybe that’s a fair criticism too.

> Do you actually think it would be better to have software patents and royalties on every Web standard?

I don’t think it would necessarily be worse than having web technologies all developed to further the agenda of advertising companies.

> It is always possible to find hidden costs in free products, so what?

The “so what” is that hidden costs are, all else being equal, worse than transparent costs.

> The idea that a Blu-Ray player won't spy on you because the manufacturer paid some royalties is... flawed.

Paying someone up front doesn’t guarantee they won’t try to monetize you indirectly, but not paying someone up front virtually assures that they will. Compare Symbian to Android.

So on one hand a "bad" company advances its strategic interests by contributing to a free and open technology. On the other hand, this technology can bring general benefits beyond the company's interest.

The question is: does one outweigh the other? I think in many cases, for Web technologies, the corporate interest is modest and the general benefit is enormous, so it's definitely a win-win.

As for Android, the open platform part is a huge piece of tech that many have found useful beyond the smartphone market. On smartphones the open source project has enabled several ROM communities that ended up offering versions free of any Google service. There is nothing comparable on the iOS side.

Even Android with Google services is a pretty good deal: for the most part you get to choose what you share with Google (at the price of some features).

I think comparing to Symbian is difficult, Symbian never was in the same league as Android and iOS was it? A better comparison would be with Windows Phone or iOS. Apple has invested a lot in its privacy-friendly image, and I trust they are doing a good job. But they are the outlier. Then you have Microsoft... I don't know where Windows Phone standed privacy-wise, but they sure got a lot of criticism regarding privacy violations in the desktop/laptop OS. Although it's not free.

All in all I don't think Android is a good example to support your viewpoint.

>Is this model better?

I don't understand your logic, Facebook/Google is data mining your personal information with or without royalty free codecs.

The reason all these companies are banding together to create a royalty free codec is because all of them realize that online video will only become even more pervasive, and as such there is long term gain for them by getting rid of video royalties for good, and the HEVC licensing debacle must have eliminated any trace of doubt.

You can basically apply your logic to every single patent free item in the human history.

Well, having to buy a new player every year just because the codecs change is not really great so I believe open codecs are better than proprietary ones.

Even worse you can't buy a license to play the content on the device of your choice(i.e your PC). I hope Dolby will get the same medicine.

Most of the MPEG contributers aren't making their living from selling codec designs e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Nokia so many of the same concerns apply. Except with MPEG those companies have a government granted right to dictate business models to their competitors via patent licences.

It's similar to the "if you aren't paying, your the product not the customer" line, unfortunately companies can charge you for something and then also sell your data to make more money.

The trouble with most software patents is that they don't represent technology invented by companies with the purpose of selling that technology. They are made by companies doing some other business, and to put road-blocks in front of potential competitors.

Admittedly this is less true for encoding patents, some of which are held by research-oriented organisations that then charge royalties to the companies which deploy the tech.

It is better because shared resources are going into improving the technology, instead of lining the pockets of parasitic patent trolls. It should be obvious.

TL;DR: patents here slow down progress, not speed it up.

> At least when the cost of a patent license gets bundled into your Blu-Ray player, you know what you’re paying.

Rather you know what you are being ripped off for. It doesn't make it proper.

HEVC and AV1 are developed the same way: a joint effort by a consortium of companies and experts. Both cost money to make, and in both cases the consortium members expect some return on their investment. In the case of HEVC, which is a joint effort by the ITU and ISO, it’s a straightforward exchange of technology for money. How is that more “parasitic” than Facebook funding the technology to help people upload their personal data to its platform, which they then monetize through ads?

The simple exchange of goods and services for money is a really wonderful thing. Patents allow companies to do that, instead of having to give away technology and trying to monetize their users through less up front means.

At some point things become more valuable as public good than they do with as something sold. Imagine if you needed to pay to use encryption like AES or ECDSA. Would the world be better off?

> How is that more “parasitic” than Facebook funding the technology to help people upload their personal data to its platform, which they then monetize through ads?

You can refuse to upload your personal data and still get the free codecs. All gain, no pain.

> Patents allow companies to do that

Patents allow a single "blocking" patent to extract monopoly revenues over an entire area of technology. http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/11/qualcomm-antirust-war-p...

>In the case of HEVC, which is a joint effort by the ITU and ISO, it’s a straightforward exchange of technology for money.

Have you been living in a cave for last year ? HEVC licensing is an absolute mess with at least 3 different entities with which you have to settle licensing terms.

>and in both cases the consortium members expect some return on their investment.

The return on investment here is saving the cost of royalties and being in control of the development of the codec which will only become increasingly important in your business.

Now 4 different entities with the addition of Velos Media, which hasn't even announced pricing.

And yet they are slightly different:

In one case, the objective is to develop a codec that fits certain parameters, one of them being cost effective.

In the other, the objective is to cram anything patentable into the standard, in order to maximize patent fees from the users for years to come. In the past, this caused the MPEG patents to be unnecessary bloated AND having to pay for that unnecessary bloat. It was far from simple exchange of goods and services for money; it was rent seeking at its finest.

It can't be quite as simple as that. Because the amount of money they can extract from such a thing doesn't depend on the amount of patents covering it -- it only depends on how much people are willing to pay for a video codec.

What I can imagine is that every single stakeholder who had some kind of video patent would want to get a share of that pie, so they played whatever political game they could to bloat the spec to include their own patent.

It's managed very differently. HEVC and H.264 have "pools" where patent aggressors can join without actually contributing anything useful. So it's about amassing parasitic control, not about technology.

Free codecs work completely the opposite way. It's about removing the barriers of this parasitic control and allowing the codec to be used as widely as possible.

Weapons analogy describes this well. The first case is akin to arms race, where they accumulate weapons to be able to intimidate anyone when they feel like it. The second case is global disarmament.

TL;DR: it's not a technological, but rather political (control) issue.

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