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Comment by AshleysBrain | Hacker News Reader

Huh, I didn't know that, good point! Even weirder though. Hopefully it's a prelude to built-in support.

This can be treated as a rumor but I heard a Microsoft developer on Mastodon hint that they had been having trouble with a patent troll, so maybe that's the reason behind the kind of obnoxious workaround too. But that they were dealing with it.

AV1 was supposed to be the patent and royalty free contender?

It's supposed to be royalty free, but there are patents for the techniques used in it which are used defensively. If someone has a patent to a technique used in AV1, then they could still demand royalties and some patent trolls have been trying. Wikipedia has a section on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Patent_Claims

Wasn’t part of AV1’s charm that anyone trying to sue an AV1 licensee would be nuked from orbit by the legal expertise and patent trove of the collective AV1 companies / AOM?

Because the US legal system (and many others) are adversarial, people can still sue you on very flimsy grounds and you still have to respond or you lose by default.

It may very well be that the troll doesn't have a solid case, but you don't hook any fish if you don't get your line in the water

Someone like MS should have more than enough resources to bust patent trolls in court instead of chickening out.

Also, can't whole AOM pool resources to annihilate those trolls? They'll all benefit from it. So this doesn't make sense.

Thay doesnt work on patent trolls becausr all they do is sue people. They have no products of their own to build their own patent liability risk so they arent kept in line. The solution to patent trolls is pretty simple yet impossible. Make having a patent contingent on having a product in the market that uses the patent with a short grace period of a few years. If you have no product for sale you can point to after the grace period you lose the patent. Also make patent holder at least 50% liable for any licensor product abuse. Then they will be stopped from patent trolling by their own exposure, as it should be if you are giing to have a patent system like this.

Trolls don't like fighting in courts, because most of their patents are utter junk. They rely on protection racket intimidation when courts are avoided and they are paid for that.

So while fighting them in court is costly since it requires research of prior art and doing all the necessary work to invalidate those junk patents, it's still often a proper tactic to destroy them.

The Sisvel AV1 patent pool has more than a thousand patents...

And AOM has deep pockets to bust them or show how it doesn't apply. It's an alliance for a reason - let them work together then. More than a thousand sounds like complete bs already.

The patent list: https://www.sisvel.com/xlin7ipl485u/7fUBcCW149MkF6Gbp7w7iY/0...

You can't counter sue Sisvel as Sisvel is just a patent pool, they don't make products.

You can bust their patents in court though if they try to sue. And their pool will start draining into the sewer. Patent trolls don't like that.

Expecting more than thousand patents to apply to AV1 is totally bs.

That is actually the case in most of Europe.

Alas the USPTO is happy to grant patents on anything under the sun, so you’ll never know when someone shows up with a patent for ”simulating a television broadcast via decompressing stored video on a computer” or something similarly broad.

And searching for applicable patents opens you to more liability, so you just gotta go in blind and hope for the best

I doubt that a codec will exist without patent claims once it is widely used.

Just wait 25 years and you should be good

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