
Google is trying to patent video compression use of Asymmetric Numeral Systems - dvfjsdhgfv
https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Storeleap/page3
======
simias
Is it too late to consider killing software patents? I guess the battle is
over and we just have to bite the bullet and be happy with these half-assed
"countermeasures".

I'm probably biased because I mostly read about software patent stories on HN
and other similar outlets, but it seems like 99.9% of the time they're only
used for patent trolling or killing the competition.

Patents are supposed to protect the inventors by giving them the time to
license and market them before the competition can swoop in and create a
similar product without having to pay for the R&D.

So do people around here have "success stories" regarding the use of software
patents to actually reward creativity instead of just playing the "patent cold
war" game?

~~~
rayiner
I think the CMU hard drive patents are a good example:
[https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839](https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839).
But ideally, a patent is never litigated. It simply allows an R&D house to
exist as an independent entity without forcing it into becoming a
product/manufacturing company. I don't know about SV, but outside SV,
investors do care if your tiny little company has defendable IP.

I worked at a startup doing cognitive radios. We were an R&D shop only--our
competitors were companies like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin that had
manufacturing muscle. We patented everything, and most of it was what you'd
call a "software patent" (even though in the long run it would be partially
implemented in an FPGA or running on a microcontroller). It was expensive to
pay PhDs to spend a year doing Matlab simulations to figure out what
algorithms would work.[1] Even more expensive was then spending years testing
those in the field (because lots of things that work in simulation fall flat
in uncontrolled real-world environments). Copyright was pointless. Writing the
code was the easy part.

I'm a bit on the fence--I think the problems with patents are overstated, but
the benefits often are too. But carving out "software patents" from other
kinds of patents strikes me as odd. There is no clean line--it's often easy to
take something that might be done by an ASIC and move it into software and
vice versa.

[1] _E.g._ one project involved getting disjoint listen-before-talk networks
to synchronize their "listening" periods without being able to communicate
with each other directly.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Summary from Reddit
([https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_is_currently_trying_to_patent_video/)):

Asymmetric Numeral Systems ([1]) is entropy coding family currently replacing
Huffman and arithmetic coding in data compressors, among others, of Apple,
Facebook and Google, thanks to being up to 30x faster [2]. Its author has made
it public to prevent pathology of arithmetic coding, which wide use was
blocked by patents for many decades ([3], [4]). However, currently others are
trying to patent basic applications of ANS – including Google for AV1 video
compressor (initially suggested by ANS author, who has helped them for the
last 3 years: [5]) in very general patent application, to prevent others from
using it in image and video compression – claims and sources: [6] [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems)
[2] benchmarks: [https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/entropy-
coder](https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/entropy-coder) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents)
[4] Charles Bloom comment:
[http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-21-15-software-
pa...](http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-21-15-software-patents-are-
fucking.html) [5]
[https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/co...](https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/codec-
devel/idezdUoV1yY) [6] Google claims and sources:
[https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-
Stor...](https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-
Storeleap/page3) Clarification: the "30x speedup" is for decoding of the
fastest arithmetic coding (~50 MB/s) vs of ANS (~1500 MB/s) in benchmark [2]
for similar compression ratio (better than Huffman, which standard
implementation: zlibh from gzip has ~300MB/s). The inventor of ANS is Jarek
Duda.

------
redm
The title sounds like Google is doing everyone a favor. From reading the
thread on encode.ru it appears to me that Google is patenting it so that they
have the patent, not for purely altruistic reasons.

If it was for the public good, the patent would be filed via a non-profit that
Google can't control.

~~~
amelius
> If it was for the public good, the patent would be filed via a non-profit
> that Google can't control.

Couldn't they just publish the techniques by some other means? E.g. some
scientific journal. I mean, a publication is strong evidence of prior art.

~~~
epmaybe
I've been wondering this, and I'm not a lawyer so I have no experience in this
regard. But!

If you patent something, and don't have a licensing fee or anything like that,
I would imagine that it would deter some patent trolls from getting a false
patent and suing people using that technique. Fighting in court costs a lot of
money for people like me (and probably you) so anything that keeps me out of
court is a good thing.

~~~
amelius
Hmm, so actually we need a different construct. Perhaps USPTO could add a
checkbox to the patent form, saying that the patent will not be used
aggressively in a court of law. Still not ideal, since I suppose the patent
application procedure will cost the same.

~~~
simias
That would mean that the USPTO tacitly admits the fact that the patent system
is broken and they need hacks to work around it. I think that would be strange
coming from them.

If the patent system was working correctly there would be no need such a
thing, either something is patented or it isn't. If it isn't it shouldn't be
possible for a third party to patent it post-facto since there's already prior
art. At least, that's the spirit of it as far as I'm aware.

------
xiphmont
I will not repost the entire thing here, as there's a few naughty words born
of frustration, and this might well be a family forum for all I know.

My take:
[https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html](https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html)

~~~
boxerab
Thanks, very interesting take on the matter. Would you mind explaining "...it
has to code everything in reverse. The latter especially is a technical
showstopper. " ?

------
boxerab
A previous post about this on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14583691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14583691)

Link provides steps for people to submit prior art to USPTO for this patent
application (patent is not granted yet)

~~~
xiphmont
The patent does not cover rANS. rANS has been independently discovered a few
times at this point. The patent filing covers Google's use of it.

------
gethoht
To me what would make the most sense would to have a consortium of companies
do this. Imagine Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all chipping in in a
coordinated effort to prevent trolls from lapping up bullshit patents.

------
nadim
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQniEobrNU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQniEobrNU0)

------
rasz
So much for publishing your work in hopes of creating prior art and preventing
patent takeovers.

~~~
xiphmont
I blogged about this elsewhere. From reading the filing, Google is not
patenting his work. They're patenting their specific application of it, and
the claims seem to me fairly tightly tailored to AV1.

~~~
rasz
so 'email .. on a mobile phone' patent? not to mention He was the one helping
them with this particular application, and even mentioned it almost 10 years
ago in his original paper.

------
burnt1ce
Can someone please summarize the patent?

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almonj
Intellectual property is one of the worst things ever created, used
extensively by that certain group of humans to hold back progress for the
entire species. People in the future will view these laws as barbaric and
evil. We would probably have advanced space ships, and certainly world peace
and material abundance by now if not for people treating abstract ideas as
property.

~~~
ue_
I broadly agree that intellecutal property isn't really property at all, and
that copyright laws are unjust indeed, though I think it is hyperbolic to say
that we'd have world peace and abundance just by their abandonment. More
broadly the concept of property as a whole ought to come into question if we
wish to go that far. Proudhon's essay _What is Property?_ and Kropotkin's _The
Conquest of Bread_ shed light on this debate, making the case not for the
sharing of private property by all but rather the very abolition of the
concept itself.

------
baybal2
>The inventor of ANS is Jarek Duda.

Google has thrown few grants for ANS research to Jarek and folks of encode.ru
community, then patented their research behind their backs

Update: they did not, but they did approach Jarek's university with specific
interest in that research work, and vaguely expressed interest in funding
them.

Jarek's stance - "this is my work, not yours, this ends this discussion."

Google - "we have grounds to do so, and nothing you do will move us"

Update: I put things in a more neutral tone.

~~~
shawn-butler
Can you provide some context or links?

This seems to contradict directly with what user SquareWheel writes in another
comment and who now seems to have deleted that comment.

~~~
baybal2
Who is Jarek - his page
[http://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~dudaj/](http://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~dudaj/)

His original publication from -
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540](https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540) . That work
was a result of two years of research that was well documented, and was making
noise in encoding community. His first notes on use ans for quick entropy
coding date to 2008.

First production grade code was published under GPL at around late 2013 with
explicit intention to enforce copyleftness of derived works, and the patent
poison pill clause.

Jarek claims that Google has abruptly ended communications with him few month
after the time of first code publication

Update: it seems Google never made any grants to the group, but were only
vaguely feeding them with "may bees" for two years, while requiring more and
more detailed "research scope declarations." It is better now to let Jarek
give his own first hand account of what was going on in between his university
and Google's research people

~~~
krick
It sounds like all these copyleft-warriors (like Stallman) could litigate.
Isn't it what they are for?

~~~
quickben
No, that's not what they are there for. Why are you so snide?

~~~
krick
I'm not. I quite literally mean it. It's their purpose, it's why all these
organizations (I cannot remember the names now) are created, isn't it? They
don't design anything, they don't write code, they do talking and litigating,
which might, for once, be actually useful.

~~~
jhayward
> They don't design anything, they don't write code

I don't like the tone you've taken. I'll assume you're merely uninformed.

Stallman's organization, the FSF, was created to protect the open-source
nature of things that he was a primary creator of or significant contributor
to such as gcc and emacs.

The Python foundation was created by the creator of Python, and so on.

To claim that there is no creative endeavor in these entities is to ignore the
fundamental reason they exist.

