H.264 came out in 2003. Shouldn’t the patents associated with it have expired by now? 23 years is more than 20 years from the filing date or else the codec’s release itself is prior art. The 17 years from issuance rule ended in 1995. I don’t think they can have any Lemelson style submarine patents that are still valid.
Not sure if sarcasm.
Patents and copyrights for things wealthy people control last the better part of a century, if they ever expire. It is only us plebs that are bound by the intent of those silly patent and copyright laws.
Copyright works like you said, because of Disney mostly. Patents last max 20 years from filing, by law. Unless the US patent law is a total shitshow compared to the rest of the world.
We need a “right of retrieval” where,once encoded, it must be free to decode and play back. If we’re going to allow proprietary media, all the prices should be clear and up front. No charging on the back end after everyone has already encoded their baby vids to avc; no changing prices after the fact.
open formats is the way to go. Patents seems more and more like a scam
Figures. Patents are the backbone of capitalism. Some say it invented capitalism as we know it.
I mean, I get the idea of patents. If there were no protection of “ideas”, some random person could have one, try to bring it to market but could just be outplayed by a big corporation with enough money to copy this idea and sell it everywhere before he can even start production. They have more resources and money, but might not have had that idea. There should be some protection. Problem is, that these are also abused by the big corporations, so… Maybe we need to fix this somehow.
It’s usually fixed with a good competition. No one corporate can abuse the system if viable competitions exists.
But if I had to give some critique, then the duration for USA patent system is one that can create a money grab system by creating a costly dependency to a legacy system that has grown so long it is hard to replace.
Market liberalism is not the answer. It’s what we have today. It ends up with the giants eating the competition and using any advantage they have got. Only active legislation works against legal abuse against those that see it as sport.
Legislation would help, but so would a vendetta against a big corporation. Can’t really compete if your corporate is assimilated or not planning to eat away the profits from competition. :D
Not claiming that is all it would take
Greed should be banned, not the patents. I feel like if wealth taxes were 50%+, people wouldn’t be incentived to jack up prices like this.
This is how it was before patent law. The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws. It is about creating artificial scarcity, which is an incredibly dumb concept in our modern world.
You need to eliminate the thought of the big guy stealing ideas from the little guy. This is propaganda used to play on our emotions. Intelectual Property benefits an extreme minority at the cost of billions of lives.
The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws.
lol they also existed with hidden and encrypted ideas to, you know, protect intellectual property…
“This is propaganda used to play on our emotions”
Oh do tell
" at the cost of billions of lives"
😂
That literally has nothing to do with patents nowadays. No one is hiding anything anymore, it is about artificial scarcity to collect monopoly rents.
The fact that you deny that we have already lost billions of lives because of corporations trying to extract monopoly rents is your perogative. It is stupid and ignorant, but your choice.
The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.
Most patents for the medical sector are built off public research. Companies make minor changes to the formula to extend patents sometimes what seems indefinitely.
Reverse engineering a physical device at this point is trivial. There is no need. The reality is these are legal tools that slow down or limit innovation so the “inventer” can collect monopoly rent.
Software patents are absolute insanity often describing concepts from several decades ago like they are novel.
The entire patent system is absolute garbage rife with patent trolls gobbling up any small business that dares to exist.
There are so many examples such as the developer of X-plane that spent 1.5 million dollars and three years fighting a single frivolous lawsuit over a software patent.
https://www.x-plane.com/x-world/lawsuit/
The average patent lawsuit, if it goes federal is around $1.5 million and can go as high as $5 millions Patents are a game normal people get eaten up by.
From an ethical standpoint companies exploiting patent laws to overcharge is disgusting and the practice is rampant
https://www.i-mak.org/overpatented/
There really isn’t anything positive for the typical person. In fact, quite the opposite. Patents are legal tools corporations use to extract monopoly rent. The rest is just propaganda.
It’s an outdated legalism. 250 years ago, the patent office operated as an incentive to record and register ideas to the public in exchange for exclusive commercial license.
Now that simply isn’t an issue
Perhaps patients have their place but software patients make no sense. One big issue is that it is not practical to avoid writing a system that already exists because there are many, many ways to describe the same software system. It’s so difficukt to search that multiple people could have already patiented the same thing and be unaware the other exists.
Legally VP8 is beginning to look like the go-to format for video…
_ /\ _
quietly
Stop putting “quietly” in your fucking headlines, you hacks. This wasn’t “quiet”, it was very publicly announced.
Via LA told Streaming Media that it contacted unlicensed media companies during 2025 to give them “a window to secure a license” under the previous terms, but the company didn’t go to the trouble of issuing a press release or public announcement, opting instead for direct outreach. Any company that didn’t respond or wasn’t contacted now faces the new rate structure as its starting point for negotiations.
If I come up with a concept in philosophy can I patent it and charge money when people use it in their philosophy? Fees for codecs operate on this plane of backwardness. Patents in and of themselves are stupid enough, but the capacity for stupidity within patenting knows no bounds apparently.
I’m gonna go patent Marxism lol. Maybe I’ll patent irony at the same time.
Something like that very vaguely happened.
Here’s why it doesn’t matter:
“AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia),[3] a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors.”
Here’s why it does matter
Most server hardware thats out there right now doesn’t support av1 encoding, so all of those, literally tens of thousands of them in thousands of spread out data centers have to be replaced with brand new +$1,500 a pop cards that do support it before they can use it
And those servers are what process your Twitchs, your YouTubes, your Netflixs and etc services
Man I can’t wait to upgrade my device/GPU with AV1 hardware support
AI slop bubble fart reverb sfx
For a while there Turbodong 2000 was my hope of what AI would be used for.
If you’re not in tears, we can’t be friends
Does this have any impact towards the consumer?
Probably price increases to offset corporate losses.
Price increases on streaming services you mean?
If so, a magical alternative exists on the high seas, or so I’ve heard
is this why youtube is lagging and buffering?
That’s probably because Google are deliberately nerfing your viewing because you are using an ad blocker.
They tell you as much in the little pop up.
Or because you’re not using a chromium based browser.
Just some classic anti-competative practices
better than watching ads!
So am I not affected if I don’t stream anything? What about SmartTubeNext will Google just make the streaming even worse for me?
Honestly probably a good thing long-term, lots of platforms have been dragging their heels in adopting better newer codecs, so maybe this will finally give the justification required to put in the engineering hours.
I’m pretty sure most of the H.264 patents expired or are set to expire next year. Maybe it’s one last cash grab before the best codec ever made is liberated
fuck the authority, chaining down anything digital because the law is far behind the relative breakneck speed of technological progress.
