[at1as]

Moving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility

[ronsor]

> At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility

Just as the patent system intended: maximum extraction was enabled while the product was useful.

[Teever]

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

The purpose of the system as it was originally conceived was not to provide maximum economic extraction -- the purpose was to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

It is not necessarily the case that the maximization of economic extraction coincides with the progress of science and useful arts.

[ronsor]

I am familiar with the Copyright Clause. You need to remind the courts, Congress, and rights holders, not me. If I had my way, rent seeking would be dead.

[avazhi]

Interesting how you’ve chosen to interpret that section.

When I was in law school we were taught what seemed obvious then and is obvious now: that Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving authors and inventors exclusive right to the economic fruits of their works. You can argue about flaws in the system but it’s pretty laughable to suggest that copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.

There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent. It’s also why if a plaintiff is successful in a claim for an infringement of either, he’ll get awarded money in the United States that at a bare minimum is designed to compensate him for the money he would have made if the patent or copyright had been complied with. Europe has some different ideas about moral rights in this space, but since you’re quoting US material I assume you aren’t referring to our funny brothers across the pond.

It’s obvious to most people that humans act in certain ways due to incentives, and we like to incentivise invention and creativity in the West.

[Teever]

Copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.

They exist to maximize the production of scientific and artistic works and do so by incentivizing creators with a limited exclusionary property right over the created work.

If the goal of this particular section were to maximize what authors and inventors can extract from their creations then explicitly assigning to them the property rights in perpetuity of said creations would have been the way to ensure that outcome.

Given that they specifically wrote "by securing for limited Times" it is entirely reasonable to make this interpretation and I'm not sure why you weren't taught this interpretation in law school -- it's a pretty settled thing and there have been many times that this subject has come up in US courts over the years.

And this isn't so whack if you stop and think about it. There are all kinds of limitations on intellectual property rights.

Like take trade secret protection for exampple -- it has no term limit and no disclosure requirement. If maximum extraction were the goal then patents would look like trade secrets. Instead the bargain that the patent system forces on creators requires them to publish their invention and then hands the rights to that invention to the public after a finite period of time. The system is explicitly designed to be less extractive compared to others on purpose.

And if copyright is built for maximum extraction why does it carve out an affirmative defense in the form of fair use for others to use copyrighted works without paying? Same with first sale, same with the idea/expression dichotomy -- so much of the antisocial contemporary intellectual property regime is configured around providing people free access to the use of intellectual property.

> There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent.

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

It seems pretty clear to me from that sentence that the stated purpose of these laws was to drive the creation of science and art and that a limited time profit incentive being enshrined in law was merely a carrot to create an incentive for that.

The framers understood the complex interplay between property rights, freedoms, and incentives in driving innovation and creation.

Knowing that granting someone an exclusive right to something that isn't subject to finite physical limitations effectively denies everyone else in society that same right the framers still understood that it was necessary to abridge the freedoms of some to enrich society as a whole through the development of science and art.

In choosing to use the words "for limited times" the framers encoded the economic priority of the majority of society over the economic priority of the minority of creators into this section but they also did not give a specific time which to me speaks to their understanding of the complexity the interplay between all the factors and allowed for the possibility that they could change over time.

On damages: that's a non-sequitur. How a system enforces an entitlement once created tells you nothing about why it was created. Tort damages compensate plaintiffs but nobody woudl say that tort law exists to maximize plaintiff recovery.

It isn't in dispute that people respond to incentives. That's precisely why the size of the incentives and the configuration of the incentive structure matters and why we have things like term limits and fair use.

[avazhi]

> the goal of this particular section were to maximize what authors and inventors can extract from their creations then explicitly assigning to them the property rights in perpetuity of said creations would have been the way to ensure that outcome.

Actually it’s the opposite - both patents and copyrights expire after a period of time, which is the compromise we’ve reached between incentivising people to make money for themselves personally (giving them a legally protected right over their creations), and allowing wider society to benefit from inventions and scientific discovery. The fact that patents and copyrights do not exist in perpetuity points towards the idea that they exist to promote invention and scientific discovery in ways that can be commercially exploited but only for a limited time, usually by their creator or inventor (or his heirs under certain circumstances).

Not sure what else to tell you. This really isn’t that complicated or controversial, in the US at least.

[avazhi]

I'll come back to this - it's been awhile since I studied it and a cursory examination of my old notes has me spotting some misconceptions on my part as expressed here; at the very least I could have expressed myself better in both posts.

[goalieca]

Now if only copyright didn't last forever..

[ronsor]

The Berne Convention has permanently burned us there

[account42]

Past international agreements are only as permanent as the people alive now agree they are. Yes this one will be very hard to change but that's just because there are many powerful interests that want to keep it this way.

[cornell532]

Why? The Beatles really wrote and performed Strawberry Fields.

Why are you entitled to it for gratis? It’s a taking for public benefit.

Ancient writings like Plato or Marcus Aurelius somehow feel different. But high-fidelity live recording feels like it shouldn’t go into the public domain. It’s someone’s commercial work product

[tekne]

Would they ever have done so without a lifetime of listening to the music and culture of others?

[goalieca]

Who owns the right for it now? I recall Sony bought it from Michael Jackson.

[matheusmoreira]

Intellectual property is total bullshit as a concept but I suppose patents are at least tolerable since they only last 10 to 20 years, unlike copyright which lasts for our lifetimes plus a million billion years.

[superxpro12]

I really have a hard time accepting software patents. Like amazon patenting the one click to buy shopping cart for example. Crazy Taxi patented a directional arrow... The infamous "nemesis" patent for shadow of mordor.

IDK.... its all bits and bytes. This seems to stifle innovation more than anything imo.

[matheusmoreira]

Me too. Intellectual property in general is so incredibly absurd it's actually disgusting, but in the case of patents at least they actually end within a person's lifetime. That's the only way I can cope. Unlike copyright, you and I are going to reap the benefits of those patents one day.

Also, it's just not true that products will be useless by the time their patents expire. Example: semaglutide patents have already expired in my country. Competitors immediately entered the market and it led to prices free falling to about a third of what they used to be. These past few months I had drug reps visit every week with lower and lower prices to the point it became hilarious to watch them try to outmatch each other. So many people are going to benefit from this. Looking forward to the day tirzepatide gets its turn.

[crote]

What annoys me the most is that they are so damn obvious! I can understand patenting the steam machine, but most software patents are simply the first solution which would come to mind to any developer encountering the same problem.

What's next, I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

[matheusmoreira]

> I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

Absolutely.

Creative works are files in a computer, data. All data is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers.

I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count.

  digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2))

  digits(32)     = 10
  digits(64)     = 20
  digits(128)    = 39
  digits(256)    = 78
  digits(512)    = 155
  digits(1024)   = 309

  digits(20 KiB) = 49,321
  digits(2 GiB)  = 5,171,655,946

Intellectual property, copyright especially, is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. Humans are interesting number generators.

That's how absurd this system is.

[fragmede]

Fortunately, the laws are (currently) implemented by humans, not robots. Patents aren't copyrights aren't trademarks. Copyright isn't a perfect system, but it's the system we have to promote the creation of creative works. It's been perverted by corporate interests, but it has seemed to serve us well enough over the past 250 years. Simplifying it to owning a number is an oversimplification that loses too much resolution because the numbers aren't short ones, they're because computers work on numbers, so the story of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on a computer boils down to a number to a computer. But it's more than just a number. It's a book with meaning and words, and so logic wants us to reduce it to call it ownership of numbers, but humanly speaking, if JK Rowling wrote a book and it was popular, it doesn't seem absurd for her to get rich off of it.

Patents, unless it's for something truly exceptional, just seem like a good system for getting lawyers rich.

Trademarks I believe in though. If I buy a Caterpillar bulldozer, I should be able to believe that I'm getting a genuine Caterpillar bulldozer, and no one else is allowed to use the name.

Our systems of intellectual properties have been abused, so it's fun to think about culture shifting to one of intellectual property nihilism, but I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

[userbinator]

I don't think video resolution will increase all that much in the future, except for niche uses, as the resolution of the human eye becomes a limiting factor.

[ColdStream]

Pretty much. 1080p it very good, 4K is near perfect to me. By the time you can see the pixels you are WAY too close to the screen.

[account42]

4K is already at the point where a lot of the additional detail you're getting is noise. 8K is just a joke for people with too much money.

[joshspankit]

You may be underestimating the desire to earn through differentiation.

Assuming the product companies accept the plateau on resolution (I agree it’s likely), there are many ways to exploit the other stuff. Colour space, tacling each type of compression artifact, additional channels (probly not long until we have HDR RGBW), etc etc and those will each come with their committees made of patent-hungry companies seeing non-encumbered encodings as “undesirable”

[smackeyacky]

I don’t think it matters in a practical sense. Our streaming overlords have already shown that by crippling the effective color space of supposedly 4K video they care little for quality of broadcast. Crushed blacks and smeared video are all you’ll get no matter what the standards say. They were, are and remain terrible on 1080 video, 4K is a farce.

[joshspankit]

You’ve missed the point: each addition can (and likely will, based on history) be the way to bring more patents into the market. It rarely has anything to do with objective quality (except in the marketing)

[account42]

You can only ask so much more before customers stop buying your "better" product without seeing some real value. 4K HDR is already at that point (for home video releases anyway).

[makeitdouble]

I read "resolution" as pixel count more than DPI.

As it becomes cheaper to capture and process higher res content, we're bound to push it to bigger displays (VR included). I guess the human eye will be the limit when we're at retina levels of DPI on a sphere.

[Dylan16807]

Most videos are probably going to stay aimed near 30-40 degrees of width. So while we already can do 8k or higher pretty easily, 4k is enough for a huge amount of content. Even 1080p can hit "retina" at 30 degrees, if barely. And while that threshold for "retina" is flawed it's pretty good for video content.

We'll see how much 360 content shows up, but the size gap is so big it basically needs to be handled entirely differently. A 16x9 screen, 40 degrees wide, is only 2% of a sphere.

[dabinat]

For distribution perhaps, but for acquisition it makes sense to have the highest resolution possible.

[jbk]

Read the list of patents left: a lot of them are on SVC (no one uses this) and on higher profile.

For a lot of use cases, including Basic and Main profile, H.264 is already free.

[kasabali]

Main profile is very mediocre. Any file I see in the wild is encoded in high profile.

[pdntspa]

Hey now, MP3 is still relevant even though better codecs have come (and gone)

Something tells me H264 is going to be sticking around for a while just on sheer compatibility and compute requirements

[ColdStream]

Very likely, look at JPEG. It was released in 1992 and it is still wildly popular on line.

[account42]

At least there are diminishing returns so H.264 will stay "good enough" for much longer.