Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This bit is revealing:

> There are clear non-royalty based incentives for large companies to develop new compression algorithms and drive the industry forward. Both Google and Facebook have active data compression teams, lead by some of the world's top experts in the field.

Google and Facebook can afford to spend money on R&D because they throw off gobs of money from near-monopolies in important economic sectors. This is one of the archetypal models for R&D, and has a lot of precedent: AT&T Bell Labs (bankrolled by AT&T's telephone monopoly) and Xerox PARC (bankrolled by the copier monopoly built on Xerox's patents). Much of the really fundamental technologies underlying computing were developed this way.

But MPEG is thirty years old now, and the MPEG-1 standard is 25 years old. Until recently, the MPEG standard has been pushed forward not by a single giant corporation that can afford to bankroll everything, but a consortium of companies using patents and licensing to recover their investment into the R&D. This is one of the other archetypal models for R&D. Many of the other fundamental technologies underlying computing were developed this way.

(The third archetypal model is the government-funded project, e.g. TCP/IP, which is also an example of a monopoly bankrolling R&D.)

The "benevolent monopoly" model obviously has advantages for open source--because the company bankrolls R&D by monetizing something else, it can afford to release the results of the research for everyone to use. But it's not sustainable without the sponsor (and we know this, because open source has been around for a long time, and there is little precedent for a high-performance video codec designed by an independent group of open source developers).[1]

I see people demonizing MPEG and espousing reliance on Google and FB as the way forward, but it's not clear to me that everyone fully understands the implications of that approach.

[1] Query whether Theora counts--it was based on an originally proprietary, patented codec.

I think that's the only excerpt from the blog post suggesting that companies will do this research out of good will. The reality is that this work is largely being done by academia and government research groups for now and it's unclear that MPEG is pushing the state of the art forward more than incrementally.

There's also the idea that our personal medical data (which is only a portion of all genomic data currently but it's increasing rapidly) should be entirely open to reading, no licenses required.

It's not good will. It's in their interest to have better compression ratios and higher quality video.

It's in all our interest to have better codecs. Self-interest is called good will when it benefits everyone.

It's in all our interest to have better codecs, but not at any cost. Only if you are serving billions of videos a day does it make sense to freely contribute improvements to codecs.

Concerted effort to improve technology can be done without patents, that's what collaboration is for. Instead, some like MPEG-LA are doing concerted effort to extort money and prevent competing technologies from emerging. That's the opposite of progress.

> that's what collaboration is for

"Collaboration" is a poor model for hard R&D. Some problem domains, like video coding, require PhDs with extensive domain knowledge. These folks don't work for free. Community projects don't have the resources to pay for systematic, concerted research efforts in these areas.

Which is why entities like MPEG-LA exist in the first place. If collaborative projects had developed these technologies first, the companies behind MPEG-LA never would've gotten their patents.

> Instead, some like MPEG-LA are doing concerted effort to extort money and prevent competing technologies from emerging.

Note that the key competitors to the patented MPEG technology is coming from "benevolent monopolies" like Google. Those alternatives are unsustainable without those sponsors. So in reality, "open collaboration" is not one of the options. It's a choice between R&D bankrolled by patents, or R&D bankrolled by Google's search profits or Facebook's social media profits.

> Note that the key competitors to the patented MPEG technology is coming from "benevolent monopolies" like Google.

That may be true in the abstract or in the case of MPEG's multimedia technologies. It is not true in this specific case of genomic file formats.

The existing formats in use in the field (BAM and CRAM) that MPEG-G is looking to supplant come from the genomics community itself. They have come about in the course of bioinformaticians' work analysing sequencing data or as bioinformatics research [1]. Thus this R&D has primarily been bankrolled as scientific research; the funding comes from scientific charities or other scientific research funding.

That is to say, it has come from collaboration.

[1] CRAM originates from "Efficient storage of high throughput DNA sequencing data using reference-based compression", published in Genome Research in 2011. <https://genome.cshlp.org/content/21/5/734.long>

The work behind that article was done at the European Molecular Biology Lab ("EMBL"), which is a government-supported research lab. I wouldn't call that "collaboration" --it's one of the three forms of R&D spending I mentioned above ("government as benevolent monopoly").

These are my made up definitions of course, so we can argue about what counts as "collaboration." I'd say something like W3C or Linux--companies and individuals working together who aren't bankrolled by either patents, the government, or a quasi-monopoly.

> I wouldn't call that "collaboration" --it's one of the three forms of R&D spending I mentioned above ("government as benevolent monopoly").

The difference between government funding and a 'benevolent monopoly' is that in the first case an entity that does not directly benefit financially is providing the funding, while in the second case the entity providing the funding has a financial incentive to do so.

And that's ignoring the fact that they listed the government as one source of funding, the link provided being an example of what they are talking about, not the sole instance. At least according to their comment, some funding for such things also comes from 'scientific charities'.

One core part of CRAM originated with that article; more has come later.

I'm involved in BAM and CRAM -- it feels like a collaboration to me!

These formats are a collaboration between bioinformaticians at a number of research institutes and companies around the world, with various charity, governmental, or other funding. They are maintained under the auspices of GA4GH, which is indeed something like W3C.

Firstly, GA4GH has commercial members as well as academics, and all collaborate together to produce file formats, standards and protocols.

Secondly you missed out a key part of funding - precompetitive alliances. Eg see the Pistoia Alliance (https://www.pistoiaalliance.org/) who funded the SequenceSqueeze project into compression of FASTQ (http://www.sequencesqueeze.org/).

The notion here is simple - there are some technologies that are so core they cross all the commercial and academic boundaries. Collaboration rather than competition is considered to be to the mutual benefit of everyone involved. It is this mind set which lead to the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), who are also in direct competitive with MPEG.

> These folks don't work for free.

Collaboration doesn't mean they work for free. It means many pool resources to solve the same problem, instead of everyone trying to reinvent the wheel and then charging everyone else for it. That's what AOM are doing, which disproves your claims in practice.

> Which is why entities like MPEG-LA exist in the first place.

Nope, they exist because of the messed up legal patent situation, which allows such parasitic entities to engage in patent protection racket which is the opposite of progress. Patent law needs serious reform to prevent such kind of abuse.

> a consortium of companies using patents and licensing to recover their investment

If this is their model, I expect them to be straightforward about it and I expect that most everyone will not touch their standards with 10 ft pole. Standards are not in short supply. I expect "this food contains known poison" sort of explicit label on their wares.

Instead they make it look like community effort, stay silent about strings attached.

We don't want their RnD under such terms.

> Instead they make it look like community effort, stay silent about strings attached.

Did they? That would be weird because MPEG standards are almost always subject to patents. MPEG is not a forum for organizing “community efforts.” There is an ISO/ITU declaration process for patents, but I’m not sure whether the standard is at a stage where genomesys was to have made the declaration already.

Show me where they notified others taking part of their patents or intent to patent. They sought out academics and invited them to take part. Yes I was naive, but I also felt rather mislead.

The GenomSys patents aren't even listed in the ISO patent list yet: https://www.iso.org/iso-standards-and-patents.html

I don't know if this is against ISO rules - it is unclear to me whether they only need to add their patents on grant, rather than submission.

The only reason I discovered these was due to an accidental hit from a Google Scholar alert. I didn't even realise it searched patents when I set that up.

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