Munich court tells Netflix to stop using H.265 video coding to stream UHD
nexttv.com
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"Signaling of coding unit prediction and prediction unit partition mode for video coding" which ridiculously oversimplified to near uselessness is encoding video using a single binary tree to select from different possible encodings of P and B frames?
I wonder if it is possible to encode HEVC without using this technique and it was just that Netflix's encoders used it, or is this integral to all HEVC. (Broadcom has had lots of discovery in the US version of this lawsuit, so they could know which products and devices Netflix uses to encode their video.)
And just for a scope of the number of patents out there whose owners claim are relevant to HEVC…
The MPEG-LA patent pool has about 10000 applicable patents for HEVC and licenses for $0.20 per device.
ATT, Motorola, Nokia, and Microsoft refused to join MPEG-LA and made their own 500 patent pool covering HEVC and charge $2/device + 0.5% of revenue from streaming.
Then there are the wildcard gamblers like Broadcom - not a pool member and swooping in with patents designed to be infringed by HEVC implementors which even indicate in the patent that the inventors were aware of the internals of the as yet unreleased HEVC standard.
Not true. You are referring to early HEVC Advance terms purposed which never happened.
>I wonder if it is possible to encode HEVC without using this technique and it was just that Netflix's encoders used it,
Probably not given how board that patent seems to imply. To the point I would guess even AV1 may infringe on it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_E...
But h265 looks purely algorithmic to me. Perhaps the patent is about using dedicated hardware decoders, but I'm not sure how that would impact Netflix. Netflix is software on the consumer side.
So are patents of physical devices. Those algorithm just uses levers or whatever.
Don't forget that the first computers were teams of humans.
What is not patentable is taking a previously existing algorithm, prior-art, and claiming patentable novelty by performing that algorithm on a computer.
> The European Patent Convention (EPC), Article 52, paragraph 2, excludes from patentability, in particular
> 1. discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
From the European Patent Convention guidelines: https://www.epo.org/en/legal/guidelines-epc/2023/g_ii_3_3.ht...
> The exclusion applies if a claim is directed to a purely abstract mathematical method and the claim does not require any technical means. For instance, a method for performing a Fast Fourier Transform on abstract data which does not specify the use of any technical means is a mathematical method as such. [...]
> If a claim is directed either to a method involving the use of technical means (e.g. a computer) or to a device, its subject-matter has a technical character as a whole and is thus not excluded from patentability under Art. 52(2) and (3).
[...]
> When assessing the contribution made by a mathematical method to the technical character of an invention, it must be taken into account whether the method, in the context of the invention, produces a technical effect serving a technical purpose.
> Examples of technical contributions of a mathematical method are: [...]
> - encoding data for reliable and/or efficient transmission or storage (and corresponding decoding), e.g. error-correction coding of data for transmission over a noisy channel, compression of audio, image, video or sensor data;
The computer science definition is all the same.
Algorithm = documentation or specification, not software.
As soon as you involve algorithms, it's not all that different from an actual machine or engineering system from a patent law point of view. Which is why you find the words like "method" or "apparatus" in a lot of patent claims. That's the little legal loophole that makes something an actual patent vs. just a "software patent".
Whether it's enforceable or gets past the patent office review is a second thing of course. In the case of the infamous 1 click shopping patent, the answers turned out to be that there was a lot of prior art and the EU declined to accept the patent for being too obvious. In the US it did get accepted but then a later ruling invalidated most of the claims. The patent expired a few years ago.
Having the patent is one thing; enforcing it another. The US being a bit more eager to accept all sorts of obvious patents has been used by patent trolls to harass small companies into payments. And it's also uses as a defensive tool by all sorts of big companies as a defensive tool and as a way to get other big companies to pay royalties for stuff that they did. Which, in this case, Netflix thought they could get out of.
It should be different. The more abstract it gets, the less patentable it should be. Algorithms are more abstract than machines.
Even just translating what you said into something that makes sense legally (or is at all coherent from that point of view), has enough urgency that politicians might act on it, and actually stands a chance of getting enough backing to turn into law, is a process that takes a lot of skill, determination, and time.
Legal logic that explains it should be worked out if for some reasons it still isn't.
Actually it does. Your assertions lack a legal basis, i.e. validity. Something being more abstract than something else is not a legal concept. It might matter to you but you'd get laughed out of a court room. Algorithms have been patented for decades. That's the legal reality.
> Legal logic that explains it should be worked out if for some reasons it still isn't.
The legal side of this is brutally simple: decades/centuries of existing patents, their interpretations, and any law suits around those. Which of course involves lots of legal bickering for the last decades by big software companies and their inventions arguing every comma, semantics of the words, and generally picking any nit that looks like might be worth picking (lawyers are amazingly good at that), etc. Legal logic dictates that unless the law changes, any new interpretations need to be consistent with all of that previous work. And changing laws and upholding them is a tricky business. Especially when they are being inconsistent with previous laws. Something like that requires a broad consensus. Which of course does not exist.
The gist is a computer program must produce a "further technical effect". It can't be just running code on a generic computer.
It would have to be specific to the internals of the computer, like a method of securing a bootloader. There's a section with more examples: https://www.epo.org/en/legal/guidelines-epc/2023/g_ii_3_6_1....
I imagine it can lead to more questions than answers. It's complicated.
So math is… patentable?
I have a patent which involves a formulaic approach to measuring and classifying certain “stuff” It is filed as data compression and being able to represent the same thing in a compressed way is why it can be protected.
But that principle was weakened over time, first by saying that the novel part of the invention did not have to extend to the hardware, just that any novel part in the software had to also be inextricably linked to the hardware, even if there was nothing novel in the hardware portion. That was not per se unreasonable, but then opened the gate for further exceptions.
Exceptions were created for software that e.g.:
- did calculations on a computer that were then manually used to configure hardware, e.g. calculations for how to adjust diving equipment, even if the computer had no physical connection to the equipment. - low-level system software, such as page buffers, even if it was abstracted over the actual hardware. - Programs that tested the validity of chip layouts.
Basically, whenever something could related to hardware, however indirectly (even in a roundabout way, e.g. through energy or memory savings), even if the novelty was unrelated to the hardware, courts were likely to find a way to rule that the software is patentable.
So of course they're looking for any loophole they can find to pass more patents. And even if the loopholes turn out to be of the wrong shape, it's not their problem.
While this would pose obvious practical problems as a system for property taxes, it seems like it might actually be a good system for patent taxes. Basically, you should have a to pay a patent tax to hold a patent. You can declare whatever value you want on the patent but have to also be willing to sell the patent at that declared value (or maybe just license it). I haven't thought it through really (just an idle thought) it certainly seems like it would basically destroy the business model of "patent trolls" and curb the practice of major tech players accumulating a huge portfolio of dubious patents as a cudgel they can threaten smaller competitors with.
> They declare a high price they're happy to walk with and then continue trolling people with their patent
They can if they want but by declaring a high price they are also then obligated to pay a lot of taxes. So the system disincentivizes both under and over estimating the value of patents. It also incentivizes property going to the highest value use. So if I can do something more valuable with your patent than you are able to do (for whatever reason) I can afford to pay for it more than you can afford to pay the tax.
I don't see the problem. Sell the house, use the remaining cash to buy a smaller house. The whole point of the inheritance tax is that you're not entitled to the whole amount of the inheritance.
I agree and in cases where sentimental value is a real concern I think there are obvious problems with this sort of system. But I also think there are a lot of domains where this isn't really a concern such as patents.
> The classic example is the poor person who inherits a nice house but can't pay the inheritance tax (and/or subsequent propery taxes), and is thus forced to sell the house in order to pay the taxman.
This is an entirely separate issue but this also seems entirely solvable in our current system of inheritance tax. You should just inherit the original cost basis along with the asset. So if you don't want to sell your inherited house you don't have to. But if you do then your taxes should be paid based on the original cost basis.
Definitely true, but on the other hand, "sentimental value" seems to be the root cause of most societal housing problems. I don't want to speak with certainty, but I do wonder if society would achieve overall better outcomes if we shifted our mindset a bit.
The fees are fixed, but the effect is pretty similar to what you describe.
In some jurisdictions you get a discount on the fees if you declare that you are open to licence out your patent. Then everyone can use your invention without having to ask for permission,as long as they pay the license fee.
EDIT: I looked it up, in Germany (§ 23 PatG) the patent office can set the licence fees that others have to pay, so you can't play games by just setting the fee to a trillion euros.
The max yearly fee is $7,400? It can be a lot or absolutely nothing depending on a specific patent.
> In some jurisdictions you get a discount on the fees if you declare that you are open to license out your patent.
Would it really ever be worth the effort just to save a few thousand per year at most?
3,700 if you're a non profit or < 500 employees.
§24 PatG offers a compulsory licensing scheme, but it requires not only that the would-be licensee made an effort to find an agreement with the licensor, but also that such a compulsory license is in the public interest.
Since the public interest doesn't seem well-defined in PatG, you'd have to check older cases to see how that turns out, but I'm not sure if even "doing so reduces bandwidth use on the internet" is enough: you still have the option of using another codec and compensate the worse compression by going for lower resolution video, for example. 4K video is not a human right ;-)
(and "we hog internet resources" is the last thing Netflix et al want to say out loud anyway: ISPs are eager enough as-is to try to get them to pay up for access to their customers.)
Reminds me of Folkrace, a Scandinavian form of motorsport where they use a similar system to enforce cost caps.
I'm sure this is a typo and you meant Le Mans but please leave it as it is. :D
A refinement would be that the government agency / tax office also needs to submit an appraisal value, with the catch that they are required to purchase the property for that value if the owner wishes to sell. This balances incentives on all sides to submit realistic values. The final appraisal value would then be the average of the owner and the government appraisal value.
The other thing you can say about that is that it's guaranteed to assess property at values that are too high. You buy things when their market price is less than the amount you'd be willing to sell them for. This is a scheme to simultaneously tax the market value of the property and the gains from trade that made someone willing to buy it at all.
How so? It seems like it would lead people to asses things at the "correct" value (eg the value at which you would actually sell the asset). So if you buy an asset for less than it is worth to you then you still have a valuable asset, you just need to pay a tax on that asset. Where this would obviously break down is with personal property that has some sentimental value. It would be unjust for people to either have to sell a treasured family heirloom or else pay an exorbitant tax to avoid selling it, but if restricted to domains where that is not a consideration (like patents or other corporate assets) it seems like a good system to me.
The price you would be willing to sell at is not the same thing as the value of the property. I might only be willing to sell my house for $500k, but that's not the value of my house because there are no buyers at that price. The value is supposed to represent the price at which you could actually find a buyer for, so any listed valuations that people _aren't_ buying the property for are too high.
So say you wouldn't sell your house for less than 500k but similar houses in your area are only selling for 350k. You would probably declare the value at $350k to minimize your taxes. If someone comes along and offers you $400k then you can either:
1. Sell to them, which you won't because 400 < 500
2. Update the declared value to 400k (and payer a higher tax)
It might additionally have the opposite effect of _discouraging_ anybody from attempting to buy your home at the low price, because they'll know it will likely be a waste of their time and you'll just update the number (and then lower it again at some point in the future). In that way it may have the opposite effect of making declared valuations significantly lower than they should be because everybody knows they're fake.
> You would probably declare the value at $350k to minimize your taxes.
Why wouldn't I just declare it to be $1? Everybody would know that's not a serious valuation, so in the best case they don't bother making any offers and I pay zero taxes. In the worst case I receive an offer and simply update the value to be slightly higher than that, which presumably would be close to the valuation an assessment would determine anyway.
You can but them someone will immediately offer to buy it and you would have to raise the declared value until they stopped trying to buy it (ie to the actual market value). Presumably you would also not be allowed to just immediately lower the declared value again after. Or maybe buyers can make "standing" offers that are valid for 1 year so you can't change the declared value while there is an outstanding offer for more than that.
> The whole point of the idea is that you're required to sell it for the listed price
I would phrase it differently. The point is create conditions such that the equilibrium declared value is aligned with the market value. And more generally, to try and ensure assets are allocated to their highest value uses.
However, I actually don't think this is a workable system for owner-occupied housing for all sorts of practical and political reasons. I brought it up in the context of patents because I think it does make sense for intangible, yet hard to value corporate assets like patents. Ideally you want patents and other IP to be owned by whoever can get the most value out of them.
Will they? Making actual offers isn't a free process, if they know I'm not serious about selling and will obviously just bump the price instead, then setting such a low price can deter them from attempting to buy it at all. Effectively it just becomes the "I'm not selling" signal and encourages them to not waste their time. It's also not like they care about the number I'm listing since it's not a price they'll get to pay anyway, they obviously know that if they offer $1 they're going to be turned down.
Additionally, like I mentioned the worst thing that happens is I have to bump the price up when I get an offer, there's still no real disadvantage to putting down $1 as the price. There's no incentive for me to put down a real assessment of value because there's always the chance nobody will try to buy it anyway, and if I get lucky then I don't pay any tax.
> The point is create conditions such that the equilibrium declared value is aligned with the market value. And more generally, to try and ensure assets are allocated to their highest value uses.
Sure, I'm saying your system doesn't work if there's no risk of your thing being bought for the price you declare.
> you would have to raise the declared value until they stopped trying to buy it (ie to the actual market value)
Going back to the original point, that's not market value, that's above market value.
This sounds terrible for owners and perfect for governments and rich investors.
Governments would love it because it forces people to over-value their property to avoid the risk of their property being snatched from them against their wishes. If you can effectively be evicted from your home just because someone else wants to buy it, there's absolutely no security and you might as well rent, rather than own property.
Rich investors would love it, because they can go around snapping up more properties that happen to be "undervalued" and make quick money of it, in a way that's simply not possible for normal people. Say someone bought a house for $100k, declare its value as such, and then demand increases in the area and 6 months later the market rate is $110k. A property investor could then rock up and demand to buy it for $100k and immediately flip it for 10% profit and then move on to the next target.
This inevitable consequence is that people would be forced to "value" their house at the maximum they think it might be worth in 12 months time or risk losing their home, or even higher to signal that they really don't want to leave their home, all the while paying more tax than they need to because the actual market price for houses would be lower.
Of course, this might also force the purchase prices for housing to be forced higher, so stopping people getting on the property market.
All in all, it sounds like a terrible system for most people.
If someone went as far as putting the money in an escrow account to buy out your asset, you could retroactively increase the declared value. This of course has a price: You need to retroactively pay the tax for a few years and a surcharge for the expenses of your buyer.
This could be repeated, similar to an auction.
For rental properties, I'd love to see this happen, it would IMHO significantly drive down prices from the current overvaluation.
I live in a blue area where the tax appraisals deviate from the for-sale listings by hundreds of thousands to millions, 4 million is the highest deviation I've seen thus far.
Thought a fairer system would be for appraisals to raise to the highest listing price, or most recently sold price, automatically.
Other states have systems where tax appraisal is routinely 10% of fair market value, and there's some justification for that that never made sense to me. Typically the published tax rates are then much higher than in states with fair market value appraisals. Tax rates as a % of actual market value tend to be roughly similar across states though.
There would be a tax rate on the value and a different tax rate on the spread (possibly zero if the spread is set by the government)
I could see X being quite high. What we really want to avoid is just those situations where someone will not take any price to move, and therefore an entire railroad has to be diverted miles around because the path in one spot is blocked.
Ultimately all this does is accelerate the accumulation of wealth for folks that already have the capital to profit off this system while forcing people out of their property. No thank you.
Then it's vulnerable to malicious buyers putting in fake bids. There is probably a good reason this hasn't been implemented.
Under the proposal, lucrative offers can still lure buyers into selling, but the security of private property is removed. You have to live under constant threat of a whale, e.g. Blackrock, swooping in and offering marginally above (market + e), forcing you to sell.
But you still need somewhere to live. And now you have (market + e) dollars, but the market just got redefined by Blackrock and you cannot afford to buy your neighbors house because it is now priced at (market2 + e) where market < market2.
Blackrock does this sequentially and can manage to legally steal private property from entire cities, just because they had more starting capital.
They can't force you to sell, you have the option of just updating the declared value to the new market price.
But I brought this up initially in the context of patents because I don't think this would actually be a practical or politically palatable way to handle property taxes on owner-occupied housing. But when we're talking about intangible corporate assets like patents most of these problems go away (IMO).
This isn't implicationless. What if you can't afford the taxes on the newly declared price?
A whale could conceivably force people out by offering a price above their ability to afford the taxes. If they don't sell, they get evicted due to tax nonpayment. If they do sell, they get the money but now need to find a new place to live in an appreciated market. Their autonomy is removed by force.
TBH that seems like the easiest issue to solve. For instance, to make an unsolicited bid you have to escrow %20 of the price. If the owner chooses to updated the declared value, you get that back. But if they choose to sell and you walk away (or don't actually have the other %80 to complete the sale) then you forfeit that to the owner. Or you can even disincentivize "malicious" offers more by saying that if the owner chooses to update the declared value then you still forfeit the escrowed cash but it goes to offsetting the increased tax bill for the current owner.
Again, X can move with the market.
How does it do that? Sure the system causes frequent changes of ownership which are undesired but you are forgetting that the "accumulators" are getting taxed based on how much they accumulated which in the long run slows them down. Yes they can bully you in the short term, which is why this isn't done, but in the long run the house will achieve the optimal tax policy and the abuse potential of housing disappears.
If the government decides to lower taxes on income, then in the long run "accumulators" would be the ones losing out from this.
The only problem I see otherwise is that it's not a progressive tax - 5% of a trailer is much more of a poor person's income than 5% of a mansion is of a rich person's. But for that you can use UBI or something to make any flat tax net-progressive.
And there was never any requirement that you put the house on the market for the declared tax value. When you don't want to sell, you make the declared tax value twice (or three times) the market value; when you want to sell, you set it to a bit above the market value, and then put it on the market.
Maybe to make the arguments easier you can encode the second one into law. But the basic math ends up the same.
I understand that point; but that's not what GGP said. He explicitly laid out:
1. Government benefiting from "overpricing". But there's no "overpricing" if the tax is set assuming you're going to add a large multiple to the declared value. If the institution setting the pricing assumes that a $100k house is going to be priced at $200k (or $500k), then they can set the tax rate appropriately.
2. Investors performing arbitrage: i.e., someone sets the declared tax value at $100k, market value of house goes up to $110k, investor buys house for $100k and "flips" for a quick 10% profit. But if it's expected that a $100k house is going to be listed for $200k (or $500k), then that problem goes away -- nobody is going to buy a $200k house that hey can only sell for $130k. And nobody's property is going to go up 5x in a single year.
Or alternately, you have people declare it at the market rate of $100k, but then write into law that anyone can sell it for 5x. The math works the same, but people feel less cheated for having to "overvalue" their house. (And people have less sympathy for those who write down a "declared tax value" of $25k on their $100k house.)
What happens if your house goes up 5x in market value, to the point where you either have to sell or can't afford the taxes? Well that already happens, and it's not great, but there's an argument that this is an inefficient allocation of resources. I understand why a 90-yer-old lady wants to live alone in her 4-bedroom family home a few block from downtown, but is that really better for society as a whole?
And if, as a society, we really want to protect that situation, we could always make an exception for a single house that you're currently occupying (as is already done for lots of things -- treating second+ properties different than first properties).
> When you're talking about people's home then obviously this would not be a practical system for many, many reasons
So taking into account the "sell for 5x" factor, other than the "you're forced to sell if you really can't afford it", what makes it not a practical system?
I'm genuinely interested -- this idea has been kicking around my head for some time, and the main thing I like about it is that it makes taxation symmetric. The problem I have with taxation in general is that I recognize that it's necessary, but the way it's normally done, by taxing money moving around (i.e., sales, income, and estate taxes) always seemed kind of arbitrary to me. Since property is depriving society of some potentially shared resource, and taxation is paying society for shared resources, having those be symmetric has a satisfying property to me.
Because the purpose of this isn't really to get money out of owner-occupied housing, but out of industry; and in particular, as the top-level comment in this thread, to make "intellectual property" more rational. If Sony / Disney want to keep copyrights on those 30-year-old titles, they need to keep paying enough to prevent a team of enthusiasts from getting a big enough Kickstarter to buy them up and make them public domain.
People more able to effectively play the valuation game will arbitrage the people that aren't, which will concentrate assets as the game is played over time and create more market power abuse, which isn't really what we want as a society in at least a residential property market. From a society perspective, we probably want a property market that makes it easy and affordable for the average person to get enough house to form a family and support offspring in a location that doesn't put undue stress on that family (i.e. through long commutes, unsafe streets, etc). I don't see how this tax system gets us to what we probably want and see lots of ways it gets us toward higher prices, market power abuse by sophisticated operators and all the problems that come along with that.
This is mostly a thought experiment so there is not an actual detailed implementation plan by the authors. But my sense was that it's not that you actually have to sell immediately but more like someone can offer to buy at $X and then you either have to sell or $X becomes the new declared value for future tax payments.
If I had to propose a mechanism, I'd suggest using prediction markets instead.
Of course in the real world there would need to be some way to prevent "predatory" offers (where the "buyer" can't or won't actually close the deal if you accept the offer) but that seems solvable to me. You may have to put down a non-refundable deposit or escrow the sale price, etc.
So it might be better to establish a prediction market for any such asset that settles on the owner of the asset on, say, a quarterly basis. Instead of predicting the value of the asset, it predicts the owner of the asset at a particular price level. Instead of presenting the current owner with a bid directly, ownership transfers and tax payments would be handled exclusively through the market platform.
...
That said, this is all getting pretty complex.
Y’all underestimate the number of people with enough money to screw someone (or everyone) over just because they can.
Like when someone made a phoney valuation for a web site at $44B.
It makes sense only if you see taxes as a positive good, ignore the concept of ownership, and are pretty loose with the human suffering implications.
Housing is very expensive, but that's due to a failure to build.
Higher property taxes doesn't reduce the cost of ownership or make housing more affordable.
This is like saying we should rise the tax rate on food because people are starving in the street
The low maximum property tax rate and systematic failure to tax full value created by Prop 13 is a reason for the failure to build.
(Now, actually, I think residential property tax is a horribly regressive tax, and its better to fund government by progressive income taxes, but there needs to be a funding allocation formula that gives local government more of an incentive for development; California has adopted some limits on discretion and consequences for not meeting targets as a stick, but that's not enough to encourage good positive planning.)
Only by indirect argument. IF homeowners were taxed more, they would be more sensitive to housing costs in general, and perhaps more inclined to expanding the housing stock.
Given that the government is funded, this would simply be a punitive tax incentive to motivate policy.
I don't particularly buy the lack of local government incentive. New development is already taxed at substantially higher rates relative to older stock due to prop 13. If expanding the tax base were a major driver of policy, then we would expect to be building already.
Also, a big shift in overall revenue from property tax to income tax. This is less stable source and tends to benefit the investor class over W2 earners.
My point was rather that props through 13 isn't what's driving the cost of housing up in California. In fact it does the opposite.
If Prop 13 were removed, taxes for new home buyers would go down, enabling even higher costs.
Vacant lots are taxed based on their purchase price, so there's no real reason to develop them when the land value keeps on rising while the taxes don't. Commercial zoned buildings aren't affected by prop 13, which leads to more revenue for the cities, hence them preferring commercial development to housing.
All that prop 13 does is favor people who bought real estate decades ago, at the detriment of everyone else.
You can always argue that the proportion should be even higher, but the proportion of income is certainly not lower
For example, one loophole during the ZIRP era was that one could get a very low interest rate loan (<1% APR, so effectively lower than inflation) against appreciated securities and use that money tax free. If the wealthy person passes away and gives the appreciated securities to their heirs, their heirs have a step-up cost basis which is the market value at the time of transfer, so no taxes are ever paid on the appreciation of the stock. The heirs could then turn around and settle the loan, tax free, as their cost basis matches the market value.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/01/warren-buffett...
This is an anecdote but there's no reason to expect that this doesn't apply to his classmates.
So, yes; given all the rebates and loopholes and shenanigans that the rich and mega-rich can use, the proportion of income is lower.
IF you drop trash on your neighbor's lawn, that is an externality. If you refuse to mow their lawn, that is not an externality, no matter how much they have to pay someone else.
Efficiency is not an inherent good, and Pigouvian taxes on inefficiency are a huge moral hazard. Is it inefficient for a doctor to play with their children instead of work? Who are the decision makers?
I brought it up specifically in this context (and article about patent litigation) because I think it is potentially a good idea in some domains (like patent law) where the overriding consideration should legitimately be economic efficiency. I think it is entirely reasonable to design our intellectual property rights around the idea that the person or firm that can derive the most economic value from any piece of IP is the most desirable owner of that IP.
I was mostly picking at how you invoked externalities, which is a major pet peeve of mine. I feel that between sloppy economics and utilitarianism, the concept of externalities is invoked anytime anyone doesnt get what they want.
I think you’re saying the quiet part out loud. But you’re certainly right that there are many people interested in maximum tax and minimum property rights.
Today, we have this illogical situation where you can sell your property for $X but when the taxman comes, it's all "oh, but my property is only worth $Y!" It doesn't make sense.
When you pay taxes, there is a disconnect between your total income and adjusted income. Is that similarly illogical?
Which is pretty on-point for Posner, who thought that a free market would solve the problem of racism and segregation.
That can easily be maliciously abused too, using it to drive someone's taxes up until they're forced to sell.
But patents are intangibles. They have no transaction cost.
This might work for intangibles.
1. There are races of cheap cars in UK, the prices of cars are kept low because everyone has to declare car value and anyone can buy it at said price (this is intended to keep the prices low).
2. I do not remember where I read about it, but some medieval town near the river used this system for collecting taxes, any passing ship would be taxed on declared value, but tax collector had the right to buy cargo for declared price.
That's a very weird idea but maybe it would work.
If trolls see that companies are more likely to stand and fight, the cost of trolling goes up and the rewards become much less predictable. Hence, trolls will lose their ability to raise funding to purchase patents and have less troll-surface-area to act upon. This will lead to a vicious (virtuous?) cycle for the troll industry.
Of course, it's a government operation.
One of the competition rules is that you're only allowed to spend $500 on the vehicle. The way it is enforced is that you surrender a pink slip with your entry, and at the end of the event if someone else wants your vehicle for $500+, they can buy it.
Would love to test out the concept :)
That, should you be so lucky to create some great idea and then patent it, the world would be better and you’d be rewarded for your genius!
I am 1st or second author on two granted patents. I have received neither any compensation nor any benefit for it. I don’t even get to do anything with them because they are property of another company.
Patents don’t even appear to be serving their intended purpose, I mean Broadcom odd just blocking the use, meaning Netflix subscribers just got a worse service now when Netflix could easily just pay to license like they should have.
Ridiculous
The only possible exception I can think where patents are distinctly useful is Pharma, and even there it's not exactly a closed case.
In aerospace, software and electrical engineering; there are many examples of consumer harm from patents and very few, if any, examples where patents enabled innovators to do useful things which were otherwise economically unfeasible.
I think the argument to be made in many fields is that patent law does not necessarily function correctly when technology advances so quickly.
You don't read the patent to learn how something works, you learn by reading other explanations that can be made available because the patent exists.
Your first points have merit but this is an odd point. Of course Netflix customers will get worse service. If you start a business and succeed by illegally using someone else's patent then you (and your customers) should suffer from a legal decision.
Instead either Broadcom is blocking them to prevent their growth, or Netflix is trying to be greedy.
Either way, nowhere here are patents helping or protecting citizens/consumers
Patents are for not for helping or protecting citizens/consumers. Patents are solely for protecting intellectual property.
Even if it's not strictly a patent ambush as per the definition, certainly it would have been more ...polite... for Broadcom to have disclosed their patents to MPEG earlier.
US law has relatively recently been amended to reduce the scope and scale of the shenanigans people can get up. But it has certainly not been historically true (within this century) that everything is disclosed, certainly not within the USA.
Also, if you've read a few software patents, you'll probably see pretty quickly that disclosure alone doesn't mean much in this particular field.
Here's the patent text at any rate.
People forget, or never learned, what involuntary servitude or starvation was actually like, or what actually happened when the hammer and sickle was adopted as a state religion.
And related to the parent, in the words of Thomas Sowell, the minimum wage is always zero. Or in other words, people should be glad that the demand for cashiers still exists, until the job gets fully automated.
I find it funny, yet unsettling, that I have to state the obvious on HN of all places.
... because what happens otherwise?
Based on executive compensation vs company profits or shareholder value, apparently that doesn't need to be an issue!
Not a whole lot of margin at the supermarket for comissions though.
Is this because your invention wasn't commercially exploited or because your invention wasn't protected by the patents(because of reasons)?
Correct me if I'm wrong but In this particular case it appears that the patents of Broadcom worked as intended and they will be compensated if their invention is used. A good example of actually investing in inventing something, then make money with it thanks to enforcement of patents.
This doesn't appear to be a patent troll case but actual technology with actual use case in an actual multi billion dollar corporation and the other corporation who invented the technology demands to be compensated for the use their tech in this multi billion dolar trade.
Mine are heavily cited:
The court order seems like an implementation detail for the enforcement of the patent. The court orders the cessation of the illegal activity, it's up to the relevant parties to come to an agreement and continue doing the same thing but this time legally.
> "..tapered optical waveguide light emitting layer and piezoelectric-driven decentered microlens array"
Sounds similar to "Magic Leap Fiber Scanning Display" ?
Which is why they had to change everything twice to try and shrink the functions from their giant beast into a smaller form factor
We designed for the form factor from day 1
Think longer term. Without patents, maybe there would be no H.265 to use in the first place. So consumers win after all.
So yes, please continue to threaten me with a good time.
AV1 was created to be license-fee-free. There are lots of patents in AV1, it's just that their holders don't ask for money:
> Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Licensor, on behalf of itself and successors in interest and assigns, grants Licensee a non-sublicensable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as expressly stated in this License) patent license to its Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import or distribute any Implementation.
AV1 is a clear example that non-patent incentives are clearly enough to make markets invent superior media codecs. And at this point, if AV1 succeeds, it will have succeeded in spite of the extremely hostile environment created by patents. If it fails, it will fail because of patents.
Whether software should be patentable or not is obviously open for discussion, but saying it’s just math isn’t really enough of an argument.
I only have a few friends I trust on such a topic, and my understanding is between IP and Copyright laws from them (ones a public policy researcher, the other a lawyer), it would be more than sufficient for protecting companies work and patents were lobbied only because their enforcement is more heavy handed, IE, it can stifle competition under the guise of "patent infringement"
Instinctively, that’s where I think it should be, agreed.
Copyright cannot and does not prevent someone from clean-room engineering a replacement for your software. Patents can do that. (Whether or not they should is a different question, but that's not what you asked).
FWIW, patents are one of the forms of intellectual property.
You might observe that a clean-room replacement is in and of itself evidence that a patent covering it was obvious and therefore not validly granted, which would tend to imply that patents cannot prevent this.
To keep the discussion well focused, I didn't want to get into the nuance of "patents are IP law too" since in broader discussions, IP and patents are usually discussed separately, even though yes, they exist under the same legal umbrella (Intellectual Property).
> Copyright cannot and does not prevent someone from clean-room engineering a replacement for your software. Patents can do that. (Whether or not they should is a different question, but that's not what you asked).
That's a fair point, only patents give an entity the legal "teeth" to do this, though there is room for argument that a clean room engineering replacement would then show novelty and non obvious aspect of a patent to be invalid, and could be grounds for patent invalidation
[0]: Arguably, the fact that courts are sorting this out and not specialized experts at the USPTO is one of the main drivers for why our patent system is broken. Federal judges are not required to be technical experts to oversee a patent case. In addition, this allows the USPTO to liberally grant patents as they pass the validity concerns off to the courtroom
Take, for example, the nuclear bomb. Just knowing that it could be done put you ten steps ahead. What if cold fusion or a warp drive were known to be possible because you could see it (even if from a great distance with little detail)? Airplane manufacturers leapt ahead (literally) after the Wright Brothers.
A tremendous amount of effort for worthy inventions is often involved simply in proving that it can be done. Once you know it can be done, you don't have to prove it anymore, and also large companies will throw buckets of money at a clone of something that's proven to work.
A patent (sometimes) prevents that -- at least, when everything is working as it should be. (In this case, clearly not!)
A Mathematical Theory of Communication.
Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423.
doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%27s_source_coding_theo...
https://faculty.uml.edu/jweitzen/16.548/classnotes/Theory%20...
The algorithm is the expensive step, design of a novel implementation (a copyright) is purely mechanical and any engineer can produce this part. If there was no patent, everyone would just pay an engineer to produce a new implementation of the chemistry algorithm. This would put the inventor of the chemistry at a huge disadvantage, since the costs of producing a new copyright is the same for everyone but only the inventor would have to amortize the cost of the invention. It would be more economical to never license the copyright from the inventor in many cases.
Regardless of the mechanism, the question ultimately comes down to who is going to pay for the cost of R&D. Copyright does not answer this question either in theory or in practice.
The alternative to patents is trade secrets, which have their own issues. In areas of software that use trade secrets almost exclusively, the state-of-the-art in software is often decades ahead of academic literature and open source. The cloud has been a huge boon for software trade secrets in that it makes reverse engineering difficult. Trade secrets makes it difficult for outside people to advance the state-of-the-art because the know-how is not public and creates negative externalities in terms of employment contracts.
To address another notion, virtually no R&D is done in open source. This is an empirical observation made by many. The incentives for doing R&D in open source are very poor. There are already large gaps in technology between what is available in open source and what exists in closed source software. Again, it all comes down to who is going to pay the significant costs of R&D.
Also, do you have sources for the statement "virtually no R&D is done in open source"?
I have no source for the lack of R&D in open source. It is a widely held view even within parts of open source, often commented on, and generally not considered controversial. As an example I am personally familiar with, database technology is virtually all developed privately and is far ahead of what is available in open source. Open source tends to copy whatever bits leak out, is decades behind the state-of-the-art, and the gap has been getting worse over time.
Software that requires man-years of extremely specialized expertise to produce tends to be a poor fit for open source. The people with these skills are well-paid and in high demand, often with contractual clauses that do not allow them to work on open source. They have families and other interests. There are few incentives to spend years of their lives building this software for free.
If this kind of software is to become open source, it will require incentives that are not a pure loss for those that know how to build it. This is the current situation. Someone has to pay for it.
US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...
EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...
Nevertheless, Software Patents do not appear to be suitable for purpose.
> "[open source, and thus public information!] is decades behind the state of the art"
It would appear that software patents are not actually actually incentivizing the disclosure of workable methods-of-the-art to society. In fact, I don't hear of people using software patent documents to make something, like mechanical people sometimes do. I would love to be shown to be wrong on this. AFAIK, a practitioner of the art cannot take a software patent and trivially implement it.
Unlike a patent, a practitioner of the art can take a unit of FLOSS code and implement and/or improve it. So, based on your view of the world, open source seems to be taking the niche that software patents should have been creating.
On the one hand, fortunately the situation isn't quite as horrible as you suggest, and there are in fact innovative FLOSS projects. In part because some companies are incentivized to release their work as FLOSS to begin with, or work with a central FLOSS pool. On the other hand, this is all voluntary. There are often good incentives to defect from many different voluntary IP arrangements, even those that do include use of patents (see the case of H.265 ).
I think -with regards to software- that we are going to need a very different way of approaching IP. The current patent system is quite clearly useless at getting people to actually disclose their secrets, so we'll need a different method.
In my view, the default outcome will be trade secrets, and it is already the case in many software areas. This has limits in practice as software trade secrets do have a tendency to leak out. I know a few clever database algorithms that are almost certainly trade secrets somewhere (origin is unclear), passed down but not in any public literature. On the other hand, I am aware of major (qualitative) tech advancements in e.g. graph algorithms that have not leaked after 15 years.
I think we need to be clear about the objective with IP law.
That, or get rid of patents altogether.
Nope, not to mathematicians. We routinely talk about the existence of mathematician constructs. These things exist and can be discovered, just not physically.
----
Have a look at how various cultures around the world did maths before meeting Europeans. You will quickly stop thinking "Math is a language".
Hell, even European maths wasn't entirely European. The most popular number system in use to this day, arrived in Europe via Arab traders and itself originated in ancient India. A culture that developed its own entirely different set of ways to explain some the logic of the universe.
While the ancient Indian system of arithmetic would look very different to anyone with a standard school education today, both systems describe the exact same things: addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division of things.
If we were to meet an alien civilization, who'd undoubtedly have their own language(s) and culture(s), the fastest way for us to learn how to communicate with them would be to look at how they do maths. Because, while their language and notation of maths may be different, what they describe is going to be same fundamental laws of this Universe.
Math is the Rosetta Stone of the universe.
This is bullshit, and the mathematicians themselves know it.
Just one obvious example that everyone can understand: Euclidean geometry does not describe the universe, even if it's useful.
But more broadly, the fact that math is not how the universe works was proven with math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
A statement that doesn't disprove the thesis in the slightest.
eg: There's non-Euclidean geometry which some say is handy in a post Newton Einstein universe.
If that fails, I feel there'll be something else again that conforms better to the universe as we understand it to be.
> the fact that math is not how the universe works was proven with math
Another statement that fails to prove the thesis; the universe itself is sufficiently complex that there can indeed be things out there that we will never 'prove' to our satisfaction.
You need to do some lifting here (perhaps a little more than 'some') to prove that Godel|Church|Turing results demonstrate beyond doubt that maths cannot underpin the workings of a universe.
Your comment reminds me a little of Gödel's ontological "proof" .. full of sound and fury but not really landing.
> ... link to Gödel's incompleteness theorems
That's a proof of some limits of formal systems — particularly those that want to formalise everything under one unified set of axioms — not limits of mathematics. Mathematics / the universe does care one iota if you use this particular set of axioms or another. Or even any. It continues to work without a care for your need to have a grand unified theory. That you cannot discover all of its secrets because you restricted yourself is not its concern.
Maths is how the universe works, whether you understand it or not.
----
But thank you for linking to Gödel's theorems. Your link directly answers the topic being discussed. You'll notice the text never says "invented" when talking about these or related theorems; it says "discovered".
Math is only “discovered”, if by it, we mean the ability for humans to have the same ideas, simply because we think alike and live in the same environment.
As far as software goes, here's a question that can be interesting to ponder. Suppose there was some clever, useful, non-obvious entirely mechanical invention that was patented. If someone else tried to sell a product that accomplishes the same thing as that invention by having a computer running a general purpose physics simulation program which is given a model of that patented invention, would that be an infringement of the patent on the mechanical device?
No because a patent has to describe the mechanism (the non-obvious inventive step). If there are multiple ways to achieve the same thing then in practice it's hard to protect and the patent is probably worthless, if not too obvious to be granted in the first place.
Software isn't really math.
Software is logic, and usually opinionated logic choices at that.
That said, software patents are a huge drag on innovation, which is the opposite of the intent of the patent system, and thus they should be disallowed.
definitely
The intended purpose of patents is well documented: they are supposed to result in technology being published rather than being kept secret.
It isn't clear why a legal patent system is viewed as compatible with a legal trade secrets regime.
I'd be very interested to hear from people who actually used a software patent in a useful manner. (Ie. Could they actually write a successful implementation, based on the patent text)
>In the modern world, the inventors often don't own the patents to their own inventions.
Right but that's most likely because of his employer... so it seems entirely besides the point of whatever principle you are tilting at.
I'm definitely interested in learning about an opposite experience. Care to share? Were these "Software" patents? Hardware patents? Gene Patents? Which country? Do you have references to the patents and court cases?
While I am not doubting your personal experiences, you seem to place them above the very clear incentive structures that exist today, which force patent owners to have to sell their patents because they cannot afford to enforce them against the likes of Netflix or Broadcom or Google. The big companies are free to infringe on such patents. That's why I find it disappointing when I see people express dismay over the fact that a patent owner would sell their interests to a non-practicing-entity that will attempt to license and enforce the patent. Such a patent owner has no little to capitalize from their invention otherwise. In the event they do not sell, then they absolutely need a litigation financier in order to satisfy the costs of enforcement ($1m-$2m) via litigation. For the most part, the system is stacked in favor of the large companies, so I find it very bizarre to repeatedly see comments that come out agains the rights and interests of such inventors.
Personally I'm not against the little guy or the big guy here.
The fact of the matter is that I'm opposed to software patents entirely. My reasoning is that software patents are unsuitable for purpose.
I'm not alone in this, it seems to be a fairly common sentiment among software developers I've spoken to. In fact, where I live (EU), originally Article 52 of the European Patent Convention does theoretically ban software patents, but see [1] [2].
I might change my mind if I hear of (m)any cases where software patents actually turned out to be helpful. Have there been any instances where you got a (software) patent outcome you were actually happy with?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38250251 (different thread in this discussion wrt European Patent Convention)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_E... if you just want a direct WP article.
>I might change my mind if I hear of (m)any cases where software patents actually turned out to be helpful. Have there been any instances where you got a (software) patent outcome you were actually happy with?
We lost because the jury found that we didn't infringe. Not because the patent was bad. I already explained that to you. What difference does it make whether or not we infringe to the validity of "software patents"? Which, btw, I explained we did not have a software patent.
I was hoping to get a different view on the matter from someone who had had a different experience to mine.
>I was hoping to get a different view on the matter from someone who had had a different experience to mine.
You come off as smarmy and disingenuous. Your comment here is also not actually responsive and just seems to be wrapped up ad hom. Answer the question: what does infringement have to do with the validity of software patents as a concept?
Notably this was a physical object and not maths.
Why is that notable?
> Patents don’t even appear to be serving their intended purpose
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what their intended purpose actually is. The point of patents is to foster innovation -- not, as many think, to provide a financial benefit for innovation. Those may sound similar, but there are two very important differences: one, it assumes that financial benefit automatically promotes innovative things, and two, it assumes that financial benefit is the only motivation behind creating the patent system.
The former is a really complicated topic, and I'm not sure how much reputable, peer-reviewed research has gone into evaluating it. But the idea that financial incentives are the reason why the patent system was created is simply not accurate.
The patent system was created as a compromise: when you invent something, a patent gives you exclusive rights over it, yes. But in exchange, critically, you must publish, in detail, the exact workings of the invention. In other words, the public good intended by creating the patent system was the free exchange of ideas, even if your ability to actually use those ideas was limited by licensing fees.
Today, we live in a world where (I think it's pretty clear) patents are not the most effective tool available to promote the free exchange of ideas. I mean, you can learn a whole lot more about how something works by turning to youtube than by reading its patents. So half of the bargain is gone, irrelevant. But we've gotten so used to them that I haven't heard any real, substantive, serious discussion in political circles about what that means for the patent system as a whole.
Presumably now Netflix will have to pay Broadcom some amount to stream over HEVC.
Presumably, Netflix will in the short-term pay X amount for this but work probably started yesterday or earlier to replace it with something that doesn't have fees to use.
[1] https://research.netflix.com/publication/AV1%20at%20Netflix
For netflix? its not that simple. Video codec design is a mammoth task. Sure you can make your own fairly easily, but making an efficient, hardware accelerated encoder that is suitable for broadcast work is one thing.
Making a spec for consumer hardware to implement, efficiently and cheaply is another.
go and read the spec for MPEG2, then compare it to MPEG 4, with all the amendments to make h.264. Its a lot of work.
Which begs the question, if it's an essential patent, why is it not part of the pool from MPEG-LA?
Maybe Broadcom didn't feel like joining the extortionist pool but preferred to extort the format into uselessness all on its own?
There are precious few ways to mandate licensing of a patent of a third party, and MPEG-LA (now Via LA) license pools aren't one of those ways.
H.265 took many years to gain traction, precisely because h.264 hardware decoding was widespread but h.265 hardware decoding wasn't.
Codecs simply don't take off in a big way until the hardware decoding becomes widespread. And video sites will maintain dual streams for many years, to continue supporting older hardware.
If my memory are correct at the end of 2020 90%+ of all online video were still on H.264. We are still pretty much H.264 only simply because it is good enough for most things.
Is this a global ban on using HEVC to stream UHD?
What does Netflix use to stream 1080p?
Assuming Netflix turned HEVC off tomorrow how would UHD streams happen on a random smart tv from almost a decade ago?
Feeling very confused because I wasn’t even aware that this was something on the horizon and video codecs isn’t a topic I know anything meaningful about honestly.
Since this is in German Court I would assume it is for Germany only.
>What does Netflix use to stream 1080p?
Resolution has little to do with Codec. So you could have 1080P in both HEVC / H.265 and AVC / H.264. I believe Netflix provides both encoding in case one isn't supported. Although 4K may straightly be HEVC only. Not because AVC; the codec dont support 4K but more of a limitation of hardware decoder and encoding inefficiency.
>Assuming Netflix turned HEVC off tomorrow how would UHD streams happen on a random smart tv from almost a decade ago?
They may only be watching HD instead. Or Higher Quality of HD encoding with higher bitrate. Which is perfectly doable for Netflix due to their comparatively low amount of content. Certainly impossible for something like Youtube where you have a constant influx of new uploads.
The article is lacking details on which Munich court made the decision... if it is the Federal Patent Court [1] or the European Unified Patent Court [2], it may very well be binding europe-wide.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundespatentgericht_(Deutschla...
[2] https://www.unified-patent-court.org/de/gericht/standorte
But none the less, vipers will spring up from the sand to strike at humanity's ankles. Avanci has declared a new patent pool over some parts of av1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38246756
I'm genuinely wondering. I can't imagine living in a world where we're just starting to move on from H.264 in 2043. But I also can't imagine another royalty-free video codec project succeeding if AV1 is found to be covered by patents outside of the AOM. It genuinely seems like our only shot.
A major defect is really in the policies that allow standardization to include encumbered technologies.
Otherwise consensus standards among established leaders which do not require the removal of encumbrances before standardization, will give rise to what we have now as "patent pools" where only well-established organizations can deploy the standard after is is approved.
It's not a defect of the standardization effort: it's the everyday worldwide pandemonium of corporate goliaths given endless opportunities to court shop. Patents are broken inside jurisdictions, but across jurisdictions this is an uncoordinated mess that can never be won.
* According to the European Patent Convention, programs for computers should not be patentable. (But it turns out that the EPO has a novel interpretation whereby software can still be patented)
* There's an H.265 patent pool that is supposed to cover all the patents essential to H. 265. (But somehow this patent wasn't in it)
Pool operators like to pretend that this is how it works (unless you ask pointed questions), but it already failed with the first popular codec patent pool, Thomson's MP3 pool - where devices were collected on trade fairs by customs because there were some additional patents from Sisvel that spontaneously appeared.
Also note: pool operators don't guarantee that they provide customers with a full set of licenses. From the horse's mouth (https://www.via-la.com/licensing-2/hevc/hevc-faq/): "no assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent"
Send the AV1 stream to AV1-capable, fallback to AVC. Previously, there could be AV1 > HEVC > AVC priorities set up, after this only AV1 > AVC.
It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
Youtube made it mandatory to have AV1 decoding in TVs/STBs for new devices since 2? 3? years, so it should become more common. (but embedded SoCs not meant for TV are still way behind.)
> Mali being the biggest.
FWIW, on the vast majority of devices (well, all that I'm aware of), Mali isn't responsible for hardware video decoding.
I think you mean Google, and they made it mandatory for Android. Most of those old devices don't use the latest Android version. And YouTube still happily delivers up VP9 to older versions as recently as two months ago.
> FWIW, on the vast majority of devices (well, all that I'm aware of), Mali isn't responsible for hardware video decoding.
If you're talking about LG, Samsung and Sony; yeah they have their own image processing hardware. That only applies if you're using the TV's app and not a settop device.
To clarify, I'm not claiming there are no AV1 devices or that it's particularly rare. Just stating that it's not ubiquitous enough to be made universal without a large segment of the populace/devices being affected.
I mean Youtube. Mentioning Youtube requirement is more relevant than Android's requirement since many more TVs and STBs ship with Youtube than just Android, and is older than Android's.
> If you're talking about LG, Samsung and Sony; yeah they have their own image processing hardware.
I'm not. Amlogic, Rockchip, Allwinner, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Mediatek, Unisoc, Google Tensor, Realtek. None of those SoC vendor use Mali for hardware video decoding.
Wikipedia [0] list a lot of SoCs using Mali GPU, but doesn't list a single one using Mali video decoder. Looks like they abandoned it since they haven't announced any new version since 2019.
Roughly; Intel since Tiger Lake (2020); not that it makes much difference.
> It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
Depends; Mediateks and Rockchips do support it; finally also Qualcomm (with AV1 being mandatory in Android 14).
I agree, it will take some time (years), until people replace their devices and AV1 will be universally available.
But it is available in devices sold today, which was the point.
> "AV1 hardware decoding is still pretty rare"
It is not. It comes with new devices.
The issue is, that it will take some time for replacement to be widespread enough, so that Netflix could switch wholesale. But do they have to switch everything, at once? They could switch by targeting the capable devices: AV1, where possible, AVC elsewhere.
They probably have such targeting already, but not they will have to disable the HEVC profiles for Germany (or EU).
No, you have to do best within the limits that Apple imposes, whether technical, business, legal, whatever.
If other platforms do not have these limits, there's no point in ignoring the additional capabilities and artificially limiting your product. If Apple wants them on their platform too, they are free to lift these limits.
Users don't care about the distinction, they will blame you for issues in your app, no matter if caused by Apple, app developers, or even phone providers.
For example, I don't see any Apple users blaming anyone for not providing native browser engines by respective browsers on iOS. Or not being able to purchase Kindle books in-app. Or similar, Apple-induced limitations.
I never said it wasn't. I pointed out the main difficulty in going 100% AV1. Not that no one would be able to watch AV1 videos:
> It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
And double its electrical power impact by going from hardware decoding to software decoding? I certainly hope not. (Anyway on TVs, it's impossible to do in software decoding, both because the CPUs are very bad, and even with literally 0 CPU you can't access 4K HDR surfaces)
> that HEVC will be replaced with AV1 in Netflix.
I personally would wait for AV1 to be court-tested before eagerly switching to it. Unlike dear ol' Theora, AV1 wasn't designed to not be patent encumbered. One would even argue the opposite. It is "patent free" only because Google claimed it was, and we're hoping noone will have the will to go against Google. Broadcom might have them.
You're confusing two separate issues: patents and the licensing of those patents.
AV1 is not "patent free" at all. There are plenty of patents that pertain to AV1 owned by the Alliance for Open Media. AOMedia gives you a patent license to use AV1 royalty-free:
https://aomedia.org/license/patent-license/
https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/the-alliance-for-open-m...
What's happening separately is that patent licensing organizations are forming their own patent pools in an attempt to seek rent from existing and future AV1 users. Their claim is that they have patents essential to AV1 and you must pay them a licensing fee.
Sisvel is trying it on: https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programmes/audio-and-video-...
And so is Avanci: https://www.avanci.com/video/
They characterize this is as providing AV1 implementers the "opportunity" to minimize the risk of being sued:
https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...
These grubby patent pool organizations are the practical reason why it's better to stick with royalty-free formats and protocols on the internet.
And why more work must to go into making sure internet audio and video formats are and remain royalty-free.
Sisvel's and Avanci's claims are essentially "Haha, you missed some! Sux to be you! Pay us!"
And the legal remedies for that are to test those claims in court and win, or to buy Sisvel and Avanci off with a settlement.
Do you think we should just make do with H.264 for another 20 years, or do you think there ought to be a legal solution to the patent mess we're in?
They won't agree to that. They are already not agreeing to that.
The two options to keep AV1 royalty-free are their claims are found to be invalid in court or they get bought off via a settlement.
Client-side hardware support is what holds AV1 back currently.
I don't think governments are good at regulating technical standards for industry.
And so this is a wash.
Since when was this even considered as a properly designed website?
NOTABUG, working as intended.
- AV1 on Android: https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-and...
- AV1 encoder work: https://netflixtechblog.com/svt-av1-an-open-source-av1-encod...
- AV1 to TVs: https://netflixtechblog.com/bringing-av1-streaming-to-netfli...
- VP9 in 2016: https://netflixtechblog.com/more-efficient-mobile-encodes-fo...
Has anyone paid Broadcom for this patent claim yet? Who? Where has this claim been made before?
This is part of what's so vicious & ugly about patents. Try as you might to avoid patents, there is a multi-decade window where some giant legion of lawyers can jump out of the bushes & make huge claims against you. Business as usual can be severely disrupted at the drip of a hat to some claim no one saw coming, with no precedent.
But given that they exist, that H.265 is known to be extremely patent encumbered, and there are alternatives (AV1) which are believed to be unencumbered, why do companies repeatedly choose to put themselves at risk by choosing H.265?
I'd also bet they calculated the savings of H.265 for bandwidth and storage outweighed the cost of the lawsuit. Now they "just" gotta shell up for a license and call it a day. Or switch to AV1.
But yeah, that's fair. I overlooked how much older H.265 is than AV1.
Every once in awhile I see an evangelist point out the efficiency over AV1, which is true, but Netflix and others don't want anything to do with this patent minefield anymore. Microsoft is apparently even anxious about AV1, which is why they removed it from Edge for the moment.
Tell them to fuck off and try to enforce the ruling. Go on with life. Way too many power tripping judges these days.
Netflix has customers in Germany, so they don't get to ignore German legal rulings unless they want to stop having customers there.