Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

I think there is some middle ground to find. As of right now, looking at audio codecs on Play Store, there is some status quo which is IMO good (but it requires to actually be written somewhere, otherwise shit will happen): Opensource applications that are not shipped with devices but are available "on the internet", or some app store aren't threatened by patents holder.

(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)

> Sisvel's AV1 license is 15c, which is imo fair for a 200$ HW, but not for a 1$ ad-less video app.

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.

I don’t see anything unfair in pricing the license as a percentage of revenue or profits. This allows you to capture the actual high value of your invention while also allowing low-value products to benefit from it. After all, that’s what you do if you are both owner of the patent and the products that use it. And a major purpose of the patent system is to allow inventors to benefit from their work without having to themselves enter every industry it might be relevant.

> This allows you to capture the actual high value of your invention while also allowing low-value products to benefit from it.

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.

> Sisvel's AV1 license is 15c, which is imo fair for a 200$ HW, but not for a 1$ ad-less video app.

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.

The only middle ground is patiently wait for 20 years. That's what happened for the VR head mount display and 3D printer.

> I think there is some middle ground to find.

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.

> 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?

Your proposal doesn't in fact say that, and that doesn't go far enough, because it doesn't protect users' rights to actually obtain and run the software. You're proposing to give up almost all of our rights without a fight in the face of the patent menace.

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.

I always had the impression that AV1 is royalty-free. Seems I was mistaken.

AV1 itself is royalty-free but it relies on other patents which aren't. Sisvel sells a license bundle of 1000+ patents[1] (called a “patent pool”) that enables you to use AV1 without an army of lawyers.

[1] https://www.sisvel.com/images/documents/Video-Coding-Platfor...

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