The future of innovation has patent-free standards
blog.opensource.org
blog.opensource.org
(Source: I'm a contributor of opensource NOVA Video Player, which was previously closed-source Archos Video Player)
As a company, I think that paying for standards is fair, but it must be reasonable. Reasonable implies 1. clear rules which never blocks innovation [1][1b] 2. reasonable fee [2], 3. freedom of using whichever implementation of that standard I want, 4. If fee has been paid on HW, then any SW on that HW is allowed to use that license
[1] Some vendors will sell their licenses exclusively on hardware, so if you sell an app, you're screwed
[1b] Some vendors will require you to make different SKUs whether you enable it or not. What if user need to enable it later?
[2] Sisvel's AV1 license is 15c, which is imo fair for a 200$ HW, but not for a 1$ ad-less video app. That being said, I have no idea how to actually make it fair. (Note that as I understand it, Sisvel's AV1 license is for HW, not SW, no idea how it works for SW)
I'd say that this is perfectly fair (as long as everybody pays the same), and it's a problem for the creator of the $1 app to sort out. The patent owner is explicitly disallowing the usage of his patent in low-value products, but there isn't anything wrong with this. Either somebody will make a killing selling a $5 app with it, or nobody will care about his standard. (Relatedly, you don't have a right to get the costs of your app to adjust around any price you want.)
What is definitively not fair:
1 - Changing the price between licensees;
2 - Varying the price with product price, revenue, or any other metric;
3 - Embedding the license with any term that isn't payment from one side, license from the other.
It allows you to predate on the added value of the product being solved. If your invention is a small feature of a huge product, you don't have any reason at all to tax the entire functionality.
But well, anyway, on practice, this is mostly used as a way to create anti-competitive deals, where some circumstances allow for a few companies to create products with those patents, while most are left owning 10000% of their product's price.
Yeah that's the problem. There is a multitude of business models, and some vendors give away their software for free completely. E.g. Mozilla ships their software to >200 monthly active users for free and only very weakly monetizes it. That means slightly over 2 USD of revenue per user in 2020. For comparison, Meta had 40 USD in 2021.
Well, I agree.
On one extreme, we have the clearly unreasonable position that popular audio and video codecs can only be implemented by proprietary software, so that open-source software can never implement them, and the majority of our audiovisual culture goes down the memory hole when that proprietary software stops working.
On the other extreme, we have the clearly unreasonable position that when a patent office grants a patent on an audio or video codec, we should kill the patent examiner and inventors, vaporize the country's capital and large cities with a thermonuclear holocaust, and hunt down and kill any relatives of the inventors and patent examiner who survive elsewhere, flaying them and hanging them upside down from gas-station awnings to rot as a warning to others.
This is unreasonable because, among other things, the inventors may have had no way to know that the patent would ultimately read on software implementations. Also, though it's understandable to want to make an exception in this case, the Geneva Conventions strictly prohibit collective punishment.
As a middle ground, I suggest that we merely criminalize attempts to enforce patents against software of any kind, following the model of SLAPP laws. We should levy fines as a percentage of the plaintiff's revenues and disbar the lawyers who filed the lawsuits, with six months to a year of prison time for the officers of the company, or for an individual if the plaintiff is an individual.
By contrast, your extremist proposal of allowing patentholders to block software implementations of international standards unless they are paid, that is clearly absurd, as it imposes a completely unreasonable burden on the open-source maintainers who are the backbone of modern software.
My extremist proposal, where I say in the first line that opensource maintainers should be free of any patent requirement?
We need far stronger protections from patentholders than that, even if perhaps observing the Geneva Conventions might be a worthwhile concession to make in the process.
[1] https://www.sisvel.com/images/documents/Video-Coding-Platfor...
Everywhere else, the only thing software developers are worried about are patent trolls, who usually don't have enforceable patents, and rely on the cost of litigation alone as a way to extract licensing fees. Oddly enough, video standards used to be relatively free of this nonsense; but the actual patent revenues have been falling for a long time now, so all the patent owners are getting antsy and forming overlapping pools to try and make implementers pay more for the same patents.
There's also the fact that ISO charges to purchase copies of their standards, but that only matters for people who want certifications. The actual standards aren't encumbered by any copyright ISO might hold on the document.
[0] For context: The EU competition regulators believe AOM may have bullied people into royalty-free licensing. This could either be read as "Google screwed up their legal research" or the EU deciding that reciprocal royalty-free patent licensing itself needs to die.
Sounds like you're assuming that the issue is with AV1 itself. My personal guess is that the issue is rather that some AOM company could coerce some patent-owner companies into using AV1, and thus "relinquishing their patents".
Stupid obviously unreal example: If Apple require iPhone resellers to display Apple's advertisement from AV1 codec. Then resellers have the choice to either stop selling Apple products, or give their patents for free to AOM. If that was real, it could be considered an abuse of Apple's dominant position.
Engineers from previous startups will cause a resurge in opensource projects. Stable companies with solid profit track records will become popular to work for. As will working as own consultants freelancers writing open source.
Patent free standards, open source and open hardware will become very popular. Trends being driven by more environmentally aware consumers and credit access.
AFAIK, China has paid no price (legally) to date for stealing tech from others and disregarding patents/copyrights. What does that bode for IP enforcement if the #2 economy on Earth largely ignores it? Does this suggest we can expect enforcement of IP protection to fade everywhere someday soon?
You’re assuming there’s an inherent limit to ownership. The rise of software patents themselves are an expansion of the concept of ownership.
If there’s gold in them there hills, why would they go unmined? See “Are Business Method Patents Going to be Second Class Citizens?” for the “everything is ownable and licensable” side of the argument.
https://www.goodwinlaw.com/~/media/Files/Publications/Attorn...
If you consider arresting Huawei executives, sanctions against that firm, and having their equipment banned/restricted for many use cases by a number of western governments to be 'no price', then sure, no price has been paid.
We can split hairs as to the steps of the exact chain of causality that has lead us to that point, but I'm sure it was a factor.
It could also be the other way around: in order to expand to new markets, Chinese companies will be obliged to comply with patents/copyrights laws. You can see that for instance Tencent and Huawei are AOM members, they can't simply use AV1 without license ...
Who then pays for the consortium?
You mean hold meetings for perhaps hundreds of people many times a year, provide marketing, provide offices and a point of contact for those interested in the standard, hire lawyers to work on legal issues, hire editors to make standards well written, entice companies to join your standard as opposed to competing standards consortiums via using sales people to visit them, handle mailing lists, trackers, review cycles, secretarial staff, janitorial staff, renting collaborate workspaces for meetings, and on and on.....
>that private companies have put together
I think you have misunderstood the process. No single company usually makes such a standard, otherwise there would be no consortium. You want a consortium to be a mostly separate group that obtains input from companies to make a standard. Companies send members to sit in on meetings to craft or guide or merely be aware of how the standard is evolving over time so the company can gain some benefit.
Simply google how to start a technical consortium to find some of the issues, things you'd need to do, and ways to get it all paid for.
Take SMPTE, for example, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, which creates video standards among other things. They've published over 800 standards since founding in 1916. Check out their website https://www.smpte.org/
They have global outreach, including education functions. Their staff page shows the major staff and functions - those people require offices and support staff. They provide market matching to connect groups to each other to further their standards - this takes effort and people. They have offices in many countries around the world.....
Also in this space are the standardization consortiums ATSC, MPEG, JPEG, CCIR, CCITT, and a few others.
So these are not simply copy and paste operations. Making a good standard and getting the market to adopt it is a lot of work.
The general ethos of most hacker SWEs I know building cool shit is: just build, if I get sued, it's a speeding ticket (That some VC will give me money to hire some lawyers to deal with).
“Abolishing copyright” is not the same as “abolishing people not wanting to cooperate”
Without any concept of authorship, moral rights and prior art we would go back to early 1900: a lot of technology was not only secret but even actively obfuscated.
Companies would be secretive and uncooperative and society progresses much more slowly.
Patents prevent small, underfunded inventors from creating. It makes access to innovation exclusively for the rich, who have access to the resources necessary to patent new ideas, defend their patent, and squash small innovators. It also forces underfunded innovators to seek financing and relinquish significant IP rights to a viralistic parasite providing funding.
They are a tool of control against the intellectual class, and a method to slow innovation in order to parasitic entities to maximize profits. Rarely do patents in the modern day protect small time inventors. Instead, it entrenches large scale institutions and enslaves the minds generating the intellectual property.
Simultaneously, with millions of brilliant minds around the globe, it gives the rich tools to squash inventors generating simple concepts in parallel. So many simple ideas — like much of 3d printing, or shadow extrusions, or using ML to read road signs — have been patented to the detriment of all.
I could go on all day. Patents are a plague.
I'm not sure why you are replying to me. I never said I like how patents and copyright are implemented in the current time.
> I could go on all day.
I can see that...
We live in very different times.
This is exactly the state of things today. It always takes significant time for a new technology area to open up and improve in transparency, and it's not at all clear that copyright and patents can really improve on this.
Citation needed.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/against-intellectual-mo...