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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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?

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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