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Comment by mngnt | Hacker News Reader

Okay, maybe I'm missing something here, but how? Per wikipedia (1), opus is licenesed under bsd license. More relevant, on their own site(2) they tout opus as "a totally open, royalty-free" codec.

My question is, how can someone just step in, say "this mine, give money" and the world just goes with it? Did the opus developers (inadvertendly) use some patented tech? Do hardware makers use it? Or do Dolby and Fraunhofer have patents so broad that they cover anything encoding audio?

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format) (2) https://opus-codec.org/

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> My question is, how can someone just step in, say "this mine, give money" and the world just goes with it?

It's called violence. Might is right [1] means the world goes along out of fear, not agreement. Violence need not appear physical, but is always backed up by physical violence in the end. There's no irony that so-called "intellectual property" is backed up by thugs with guns. Whatever noble aims patents began with they are now nothing more than a form of violent "political language" against the intellectual classes, designed, as Orwell said, to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right

[2] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

civil litigation is not violence just because the police exist. This is a terrible take. Stop making non violence into 'violence' just because its something you don't like.

> Did the opus developers (inadvertendly) use some patented tech?

That’s certainly the claim since it’s a patent pool.

> Do hardware makers use it?

If it’s a fundamental building block of opus then necessarily, no?

Hardware codecs are just generic applications of VHDL and integrated circuits. Making integrated circuits work is a legitimate challenge, but that's an integrated circuits patent, not a codec patent.

The opus software implements several ideas covered by patents. The software is open source, but using it and selling it is potentially encumbered in patents.

In this case, they seem happy enough for people to keep using it under the open source license (I'm not sure the patent pool has any direct power over the software), and seemed more focused on where the money is: people building this into hardware.

I'm with you though. They shouldn't have described it as royalty-free.

All known software patents that cover Opus are licensed under royalty-free terms.

However, Fraunhofer and Dolby are apparently thinking that they are holding patents that are relevant for Opus. It will be interesting to see what these patents are.

Wikipedia points to the 3-clause BSD license. Looking up the text of that, there's no mention of patents.

Software licenses primarily deal with copyright -- the ability to control how a concrete representation of an idea can be copied or performed. Patents deal in the abstract idea itself.

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