[gjsman-1000]

Reminder that in the United States; open standards and patent licensing are not incompatible.

HEVC, for example, has public documents how to implement it. You can get all the specs right now. You don’t even need to pay for the standard itself. You do, however, need to pay the people who own patents on algorithms used within the open standard.

Do I like it? No. But when there’s 50-100 patent claimants, that’s where MPEG LA shows up to simplify things. You don’t strictly need MPEG LA if you don’t mind negotiating with every patent holder individually.

[jevoten]

Hilariously, legally, software seems to be unpatentable in both the US [1] and EU [2]. Yet those laws are routinely ignored, and we continue to be plagued by software patents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...?

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur... - The wiki states that because of the "as such" clause, the exclusion of software patents does not apply to software that does anything inventive or solves a technical problem. But those are already requirements of patentability for anything, software or not. In other words, this interpretation of "as such" renders that entire clause totally meaningless - it could be struck entirely from the law, and software would be no more or less patentable. Clearly such a reading is absurd, and only shows the willingness of courts to ignore law for business interests.

[voidwtf]

You are right, I conflated the two a bit there. It is an important distinction/difference but with a similar outcome. Especially egregious to me that often the people pushing the newer standards are the same ones signing on to be part of the patent pool. I guess my feeling is that if you want to make it a standard, it should be unencumbered by patents, paywalls, and NDAs. Otherwise how can you expect me to implement the standard?

These companies often make these advancements because it's beneficial to their bottom line, because they can utilize fewer resources or provide a better product to their customers. They then expect everyone to implement their standards so they can reap the benefit of those changes with all their customers.

[gjsman-1000]

> I guess my feeling is that if you want to make it a standard, it should be unencumbered by patents, paywalls, and NDAs. Otherwise how can you expect me to implement the standard?

Well, when you are developing a standard, there is no guarantee that every person who owns a patent will reveal themselves. There’s no guarantee your due diligence will find them all either. You could develop a completely open standard, someone announces they’ve got a patent, and if they win in court, that’s the end of it being an open standard.

> These companies often make these advancements because it's beneficial to their bottom line, because they can utilize fewer resources or provide a better product to their customers.

That’s just called business. That’s not evil, and if Linux didn’t benefit their bottom line, it would not be usable today (considering over 90% of contributions are from the big evil companies).