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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The format claims to be "royalty-free" but standard itself is not free.

Also it seems it has unresolved patent issue: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

Shades of LizardTech v. ERM I hope not.

That was a US filed in 1999, decided 2005 patent case over mid 90s use of discrete wavelet transforms in image storage, and the progressive loading of very large images rather than the prior full scanline by scanline loading of the dialup era ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....

Court cases over patents on mathematical techiques and their implemantations really pisses me off .. being called as an expert witness even more so - it's more excruciating than teaching first year engineering students linear algebra . . . (I'll let myself out).

Could someone ELI5 the following?

1. Weren't "ideas" not supposed to be patentable, but only actual implementations? Given that, how can an algorithm be patented?

2. Wasn't prior art supposed to invalidate a patent? If the algorithm was already used in JPEG-XL, then clearly Microsoft isn't the first to discover it, and hence should not be able to patent it, right? Or if the algorithm in JPEG-XL is considered different, then there's no infringement by definition, right? So what's the issue?

One is theory, second is practice. Here is some discussion about this patent:

https://encode.su/threads/3863-RANS-Microsoft-wins-data-enco...

1. In patent law an idea is a creation that has been imagined but not yet prototyped, produced, or manufactured and they can be patented. Products with usefulness are patentable. Including algorithms used in software, and process (act or method of doing something)

2. In the US prior 2013 that was often the case. In 2013 US switched from first-to-invent to first-to-file system to be more compatible with the rest of the world.

That is a common misunderstanding of first-to-file. Under first-to-file, prior art is absolutely still a defense, and much easier to prove than under first-to-invent. If you publicly disclose something before someone who invented, but did not disclose, the same thing, your publication counts as prior art. It is much easier (read: cheaper) to demonstrate that "X document was published on Y website on Z date" than it is to start doing discovery to compare private lab notebooks or whatever to decide who really invented the thing first.

First-to-file is mostly about simplifying the complicated litigation edge cases where two people claim to have invented, but not disclosed, the same thing during the (US-specific) one-year grace period they have to file a patent on it.

Prior art may still not invalidate the patent, though. Usually the patent holder will argue that their patent differs from the prior art in some respect (you can often find these arguments in the patent's file wrapper at http://patentcenter.uspto.gov/). But that narrows the scope of the patent, and being your own prior art is a pretty good defense against infringement.

This is a huge powergrab by our industry - it is the only industry in the world that gets both patent and copyright protection. Think about it, you can patent a car engine, but you cannot get copyright on it. You get copyright on a book, but you can't patent a book.

Also that's mostly US. By contrast, in Europe, software is generally not patentable.

The schematics, engineering drawings, 3d models, CAD files, process documentation etc for making a car engine (or anything else) are all copyright protected. So how exactly is software special?

that's very different - does not stop me copying a car engine and selling my knockoff.

I can buy a car engine, modify it and sell my modification.

Supplimentary documentation, and schematics are a separate matter - but engine itself is not protected. Software itself is protected, you can do nothing..

While the software patent is a spicy issue, Jon Sneyers once noted that Microsoft may be in a deep trouble if they actually exercise that patent because of both Google's and Cloudinary's defensive patents [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1526598054685642753

Editors wanted to make the standard freely available (one of them even wrote an open letter [1]) but for now it is paywalled. I personally worked with a recent community draft which was circulated in the JPEG XL discord.

[1] https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1420765059739914243

"JPEG XL discord" - man I feel like I'm really getting old and falling out of the loop. Discord to me is that young people/gamers walled garden platform, for voice chat and sharing meme gifs.

Nowadays Discord is used for all sort of things. If you don't want to join the Discord server, you may reach editors and they are probably willing to hand out the most recent draft.

Discord has replaced many forums, sadly. They're even rolling out a special forum feature right now that (obviously) can't be indexed by Google.

Public post-based discussion is moving to quick chats in private servers. It started out with Slack spaces but has moved to Discord because of Slack's inferior UX/UI/business model.

This makes taking part in a community a lot easier as you can actually talk to the people working on the stuff you're excited about, like you could with good ol' IRC except you don't need to log in at the exact right time to send them a message. Some open source projects opt to use Matrix rather than Discord or Slack, which is an open standard but the problems still remain.

Especially, finding a solution to an obscure error message can be a real challenge if you don't want to join some random chat room full of existing conversations to ask the question yourself, even if ten or twenty people before you already did the same. I much prefer the forums for this type of stuff but most of the world seems to disagree.

> It started out with Slack spaces but has moved to Discord because of Slack's inferior UX/UI/business model.

Having never used Slack, this statement astonishes me. It is difficult for me to imagine a worse UX/UI than Discord is.

If you don't pay Slack, they limit everything, including search, to 10,000 messages.

This is particularly bad for projects with a high-traffic general chat, and low-traffic chats which are topic-oriented, because the 10k limit is per 'server' not per chat, anything low traffic ends up having little to no history visible.

My time with Slack is mostly over but it always surprised me with how popular it still is. I've always found Slack to be slower on my machines despite both Discord and Slack being Electron based. Slack has some serious memory usage bugs every now and then and lacked many features built into Discord for years now.

Discord copied the channel system Slack uses but allows for fast and easy switching between workspaces. Slack lacks that, there's a dropdown somewhere but every workspace asks me to create a separate account rather than giving me the option to reuse an existing one, even when I enter the same email address I've used elsewhere.

Slack got off to a good start but it's like they stopped innovating at some point. I don't remember any new feature they've added that other chat apps don't already have.

Discord is also free with paid features per account (that most people don't really need imo) whereas Slack keeps your messages hostage if you don't pay (you van only scroll back a certain number of messages but once you start paying you can read them again).

Their model is clearly oriented at businesses paying subscription costs per user within their organisation. Discord's allows for much more organic server creation because anyone can join for free and only those who need the extra features need to pay.

One benefit of Slack is that it gives some kind of guarantee in regards to data processing. Discord isn't business oriented so its setup isn't great for companies who don't want their data to leak. Last time I checked, Slack's guarantees were a lot stronger than Discord's.

This can lead to pretty funny hybrid use. I've seen people have digital meetings over Discord (because Discord's voice and video channels are excellent) with Slack open for sharing text, documents, and all other kinds of attachments. Using Discord is probably against company policy (mandating stuff like Google Meet or Zoom) but the Discord UX is so much easier than many competitors. Its performance is also pretty good! During COVID lockdown my university gave some lectures over Discord when the dedicated video lecturing system (set up for a few small lectures a week rather than hundreds of people joining tens of lectures around the clock during working hours) got overloaded and went down hard. It took the university weeks to get enough capacity for their streaming setup and switching to Discord took one suggestion and an hour or so of setting up for every teacher.

I think the difference between Discord and all other companies is that Discord is clearly targeting normal user adoption, luring people in with easy to use features and tools, whereas its competitors target corporate contracts, locking down a whole group of users at once that don't really have a say in their messaging platforms.

I don't think Discord cares much about the business market but with a few small adjustments (i.e. only accepting accounts with a certain email suffix into a certain server, allowing an organisation to pay for Discord for all users within a guild) I bet they could start competing with Slack quite easily.

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