"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.
>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.
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.
Can someone explain me how the Munich court can tell that to Netflix since software patents aren’t supposed to be patentable as the Article 52 of the European Patent Convention say.
Because EU and German jurisprudence have created plenty of holes. It used to be that pure software inventions were unpatentable, while mixed software/hardware inventions (the classical example is anti-lock brakes) were patentable. Doctrine was that the invention had to have a "technical effect", basically working through the forces of nature. So, an invention was patentable originally if the novel part of the invention extended to the hardware.
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.
The patent business is one with no downsides for the patent office: They get a fee for granting a patent, they get a fee for renewing a patent every couple years, they get to fell important when they report to their government how "innovative" the country is through the number of patents granted. If a patent is found to be invalid, it's struck from the records, no penalty to the patent office. If a patent is found to overlap entirely with an earlier patent issued at the same office, it's struck from the records, no penalty to the patent office.
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.
I would assume that such algorithms falls in the "schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers".
No, it doesn’t. The ban against software patents is to prevent things like “X, but using software” from being patented. A good example is Sonos’ patent on controlling the volume of multiple speakers from an app. That’s just a dumb patent. Video encoding is very complex and non-obvious. Personally, I see the argument for patent protection.
> 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;
Yes, and the algorithm itself, whether by hand or on a computer, is patentable.
What is not patentable is taking a previously existing algorithm, prior-art, and claiming patentable novelty by performing that algorithm on a computer.
I don't know. The sonos patent is stupid indeed, but I could see how it got accepted as it's about hardware speakers with some software control, which can be patented.
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.
Could you expand more? I have a bit of a hard time seeing how one can patent algorithms but not software. I kinda see it, but I would appreciate a broader explanation, if you could share more? Also, you can patent the global systems and its algorithms, but you can't patent the software that is in-between? (a quick google doesn't raise much)
How is it any different? Sounds like demagoguery to say that software isn't patentable, but algorithms are. Algorithms shouldn't be patentable even stronger, since it's more abstract than software. It's function claiming otherwise.
Yes if it has a marked impact on physical data storage/size.
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.
There's no such thing as "the computer science definition" as far as patent law is concerned. Lawyers aren't engineers or scientists. Patents are basically lists of claims that have a lot of complicated wording that is designed to get interpreted by other patent laywyers in very specific ways. What is and isn't a software patent is extremely murky water.
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.
That's simply not up to me or you. Neither of us are lawyers or legally trained (I'm assuming, of course). We'd sound like bumbling baboons in a court of law without proper representation. You wouldn't want a lawyer to tell you how to code either because of something they dreamt up not hindered by even the slightest bit of knowledge. Same difference.
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.
That doesn't negate the validity of the basic idea. Algorithms shouldn't be patentable becasue they are more abstract than machines and they give too much monopoly power to those who claim to own them.
Legal logic that explains it should be worked out if for some reasons it still isn't.
> That doesn't negate the validity of the basic idea.
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.
If you think this isn't working this way, then the legal system needs fixing so it would. As simple as that. Software patents situation is so messed up because basic and obvious ideas like this aren't applied as they should be.
Years ago I read the book "Radical Markets" by Glenn Weyl and Richard Posner. One of the ideas was a system of property tax system in which you pay property tax based on a property value which you get to declare (rather than some assessment by a third-party or government agency). The catch is that you are required to sell to anyone who offers your declared value. So a bit like a land value tax but fully general (can be applied to anything) and also sidestepping the issue of how to actually determine the the "value" in land value.
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.
> The catch is that you are required to sell to anyone who offers your declared 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.
> 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.
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.
Extortion is a risk in this modified implementation. "Is that a $1 house? I'll buy it for $100. No? Enjoy your tax bill. If you want the bill to go away, sell it to me for $0.50."
If I had to propose a mechanism, I'd suggest using prediction markets instead.
But for that to work you have to actually be willing to buy at $100. So you can come along and try and buy my house for 2x the market rate, but then I can just sell it to you and you're screwed.
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.
If the solution requires the full payment to be in escrow before the seller is even aware of this particular unsolicited buyout order, it will become difficult for lenders to provide mortgages since they will have no guarantee that the seller isn't already in a negotiation with another buyer.
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's one (pessimistic) way to look at it. Another way to look at it is it's a thought experiment on how to solve the disconnect between a property owner's asset value for the purpose of sale vs. its value for the purpose of taxes. If you're against the very concept of taxes, then obviously nothing is going to make you happy, and the discussion is pointless.
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.
Why do you think the disconnect is illogical and needs to be solved? Do you know that isn't how it actually works? The taxman tracks the real real appraised value too.
When you pay taxes, there is a disconnect between your total income and adjusted income. Is that similarly illogical?
The original thought experiment is not really about extracting maximum tax revenue (the overall level of taxation is pretty orthogonal to how you assess and collect taxes) but more in the spirit of how to promote more efficient allocation of resources in economic terms. Think of it as a Pigouvian tax on inefficiency.
I think that this is both an incorrect and amoral way of thinking about externalities. Externality costs Must be real incurred costs, not just hypothetical opportunity costs. Otherwise they are useless for economic analysis and lead to repugnant conclusions
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?
The comments here have been very focused on the case of implementing some system like this for housing (which to be fair was the example the book used), but as I said in the original comment, I actually don't think this is a workable or desirable system for property taxes on owner-occupied housing for roughly the reasons that you dislike it. Someone's home is not just some financial asset and economic efficiency is not the only important consideration in society.
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.
That's fair. I agree that intellectual property does not have the same foundational justifications as physical property. IP justifications ARE generally based on economic efficiency rationales, and typically cut contrary to physical property rights (e.g. Why cant I produce a copy for sale with material I own, in a factory I own)
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.
One issue with prop 13 has been a major shift in (property) tax burden from large commercial to residential owners.
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.
Prop 13 is one factor that's driving the cost of housing up in California.
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.
I'm in favor of everyone paying taxes fairly to get high quality city services, instead of having people with large increases in property value getting an unfair tax subsidy.
This brings things back to taxation of realized vs unrealized gains. If you want fair Taxes, we should probably do away with property tax entirely, and focus more on income taxes themselves.
I don't think that is true. The bottom half generally pays zero income tax. The proportional income tax increases continuously. There is no group that makes more and pays less proportionally if you look at the actual data. Here is the percent income paid (after all deductions) for different groups.
You can always argue that the proportion should be even higher, but the proportion of income is certainly not lower
People that are wealthy enough don't really pay income tax.
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.
Then you don't know the real estate speculation game. Investors buy vacant plots at the periphery of a city for cheap and just... wait. When it is time to sprawl you have to pay huge sums to them for land that is empty. The tax break that you think is going to the home buyer merely raises the value of this land and the investor is getting the money instead of the local government that managed the city.
> Housing is very expensive, but that's due to a failure to build.
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.)
>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.
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.
People don't block commercial construction because it raises property values. They block residential construction because it lowers their property values. You get an imbalance of jobs to housing and then people complain about expensive housing.
> I think it is still fair to point out that it is a thought experiment on how to extract as much value in the form of taxes.
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.
> 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.
That can easily be maliciously abused too, using it to drive someone's taxes up until they're forced to sell.
The issues you describe could all be nullified by making a simple change - The price the person can purchase your property for must be X% greater than the fair value you declare. If you set X at 10% then there is no chance for property investors in your example to flip if the price increases by 10% during the year. You could even make X dependent on market conditions - If all the housing market moves up in your area, X is increased for everyone by that amount.
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.
And as the housing market moves 20%+ in a year in some places all you've done is kick the can down the road to figuring out a value of X that is high enough that no forced turnover of property happens so you're not violating the principles of property ownership. But also low enough that there's still a threat of exactly that happening.
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.
>Ultimately all this does is accelerate the accumulation of wealth for folks that already have the capital to profit off
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.
It still seems like a bad idea to me. Anyone under the current market can make a bid for an off-market property, but it's not their property. They cannot force an owner to sell. Tbey can only entice them with lucrative offers.
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.
> 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
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).
> They can't force you to sell, you have the option of just updating the declared value to the new market price.
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.
To be honest, I wish the authors hadn't framed their idea on property taxes because there are a lot of obvious practical and political issues with doing it. And I don't personally think this would be a good way to do property taxes on owner-occupied housing. I only brought it up originally because I think a lot of issues with it are irrelevant when applied in the domain of intangible economic assets like patents. In that particular domain I think the overriding principle of intellectual property law should be to maximize economic efficiency.
> Then it's vulnerable to malicious buyers putting in fake bids
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.
Isn't that equivalent to setting the tax rate X% lower?
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.
> This sounds terrible for owners and perfect for governments and rich investors.
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.
I've looked at property taxes in different states and some states have a system where tax appraisals are roughly based on actual fair market value, possibly with adjustments which may be distorting (Prop 13, for instance), and those will usually take a completed sale price as evidence of fair market value.
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.
Even so! This is usually closer than the assessor estimate! Assessor estimates are wildly off, mine by nearly $400k, or more than 60% of the total value.
You could modify it so you have to sell it at that price you listed if you decide to sell it at any point.
Of course you'd need a system to feature in normal price appreciation but that can all be worked out, like not being able to change the price year-on-year by more than a certain percentage and then being forced to sell at the 3-year low price or smth like that.
That's true. You'd slow it down a bit with the limited price increase & lowest-price-in-a-certain-timeframe rule, but you'd need some other remedy to plug that loophole.
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.
You're right but usually there is a spread for any transaction and so the government could step back in and define a safe spread (something high like 20%) or the crazy (but efficient) option would be to allow the owner to define the spread.
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)
It also completely ignores the personal aspect of value. If I lived next door to my sister that is value for me since she can watch the kids if I need to run out for something but she won't do that for anyone else. Likewise sentimental value, a 4th generation home can influence people's price a lot.
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.
Yeah, like I said it has obvious practical problems when applied to things like primary residence so I don't think it would actually be a workable system for replacing existing property taxes.
These "problems" assume that the "tax value" will actually be similar to the "market value". What's the difference between "0.1% on the declared tax value, you have to sell it for the declared tax value" and "0.2% on the declared tax value, you have to sell it for twice the declared tax value"? I'll give you a hint: the numbers come out to be the same.
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.
The above actually plays into the heart of the first criticism (although the first criticism has some problems).
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.
The point is that everything is always implicitly on the market at all times. So if you declare your house to be worth $X then you have to accept on offer of $X (or else declare a new, higher value going forward). When you're talking about people's home then obviously this would not be a practical system for many, many reasons. But in other domains it seems like a reasonable idea.
> The point is that everything is always implicitly on the market at all times.
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.
Maybe practical is the wrong word, but I think it would be politically untenable if applied to houses. And the only way to make it politically tenable would be to add so many exceptions and loopholes that it wouldn't substantially change anything. Like if you just excepted owner-occupied housing you would already have exempted most of the housing stock in the United States. And if you didn't except all the owner-occupied housing, what is the political message exactly? "We want to kick you out of your house or raise your property taxes so property developers can make more money!" Like I get intellectually why that may be desirable but it strikes me as a tough sell to the voting public.
> Like if you just excepted owner-occupied housing you would already have exempted most of the housing stock in the United States.
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.
> One of the ideas was a system of property tax system in which you pay property tax based on a property value which you get to declare (rather than some assessment by a third-party or government agency). The catch is that you are required to sell to anyone who offers your declared value.
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.
>One of the ideas was a system of property tax system in which you pay property tax based on a property value which you get to declare (rather than some assessment by a third-party or government agency). The catch is that you are required to sell to anyone who offers your declared value.
Reminds me of Folkrace, a Scandinavian form of motorsport where they use a similar system to enforce cost caps.
24 hours of lemons has a similar rule. As far as I know the race organizers have only ever taken the option to purchase a car once. A friend of mine raced lemons for years and said the biggest offenders were people who put way too much money into fox body mustangs, but it was a non issue since those guys inevitably crashed before the race is over.
> One of the ideas was a system of property tax system in which you pay property tax based on a property value which you get to declare (rather than some assessment by a third-party or government agency). The catch is that you are required to sell to anyone who offers your declared value. So a bit like a land value tax but fully general (can be applied to anything) and also sidestepping the issue of how to actually determine the the "value" in land 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.
> The other thing you can say about that is that it's guaranteed to assess property at values that are too high
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.
> 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).
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.
You don't necessarily declare the value at what you are actually willing to sell at. It's more like you declare it at the minimum value that nobody else is willing to buy at. If anything like this were actually implemented (which seems wildly unlikely for many, many reasons) the owner would have the option to update the declared value if they don't actually want to sell at the previous declared value.
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)
Isn't that changing the rules? The whole point of the idea is that you're required to sell it for the listed price, there's risk involved in trying to reduce the value to lower your taxes. If you're allowed to update the price higher whenever you receive a buy offer that defeats the whole point, you can freely list the property as low as possible for tax purposes with no actual risk of having to sell it at that price.
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.
> 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).
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.
Much like property taxes, this can easily result in forcing the holder to sell due to insufficiently liquid assets to pay the tax with. 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. If you dismiss any sentimental value, then it doesn't really matter, but real life is a lot messier than that.
> poor person who inherits a nice house but can't pay the inheritance 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.
> If you dismiss any sentimental value, then it doesn't really matter, but real life is a lot messier than that.
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.
> If you dismiss any sentimental value, then it doesn't really matter, but real life is a lot messier than that.
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.
Wouldn't this further entrench the patent problem? Companies with a lot of money would be the only ones able to fend off patent trolls. Patent trolls will be more easily able to aquire patents through a regulated system, and likely for cheaper, since people may list them low just for "holding" since they can't afford to list them high and pay the patent tax.
That's already how this works, basically. You have to keep paying a fee to keep your patent, and the fees increase with each year of the patent.
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.
§23 PatG covers the case where the patent owner wants to use a general public licensing scheme offered by the patent office to avoid having to deal with every single licensee. That one is opt-in by the patent owner.
§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.)
The difference would be that the fee you have to pay is scaled to the value someone else can get from the patent. So if you have a patent which is not valuable to you but is valuable to someone else, then you either have to sell the patent to them or pay a tax based on what value they could get from it.
I don't see how it would destroy patent trolls. If anything it would just give them more runway, wouldn't it? They declare a high price they're happy to walk with and then continue trolling people with their patent. Corporations will pay the tax to maintain their patent and occasionally engage in minor amounts of corporate raiding against each other by "stealing" patents back and forth they otherwise maintain in perpetuity. Also, what if I build a business on my patent and someone purchases it away? Does the business go, too? Do I get a license? So on and so forth. This seems like an almost guaranteed worse system than we have already.
I am assuming the GP also implies taxation on the value claimed for the patent. Tangentially, I would also love the equivalent option the other way around, I.e. in property taxation, where the government decides the value of the property, to also be obliged to buy the property at that price if so asked by the owner, an option contract of sorts.
Maybe, like any system it almost certainly looks better on paper than in practice and I haven't thought about it too hard. Mostly I thought it was an interesting idea.
> 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.
The patent troll problem can be solved industry-wide with the formation of a patent-troll legal defense fund. A bunch of companies put money into a fund. If any company (not just the contributors) is sued by a troll, they can apply to the fund to pay for legal assistance (applicable controls can include approval, fund limits, etc).
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.
The patent troll problem IS solved by a patent-troll legal defense fund. This is exactly what the function of patent examiners is. They are supposed to try to invalidate patents before they have any chance to be applied in court.
On a much smaller level, some car races/events (the Gambler 500 - or offshoots, rather, the Gambler doesn't enforce) use a similar model for fairness.
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.
What makes you think patent holders don't want to license? Patents are already a significant financial investment. Also, patents are already financialized. I was litigating against a patent-holding defendant that used their IP holdings as collateral for a large bank loan. Patent trolls would much rather license their technology than litigate it, it's the big companies that refuse to license.
Idea is very interesting and thought provoking way to get better appraisals,
but it gives too much power to the single buyer over the owner.
(E.g. One could force a competitor to incur either additional tax or cost of forced relocation)
That seems bad, because you should hold an investment if and only if it is profitable. If anyone can take your investment from you as soon as they see it is profitable, you'll have no reason to invest.
They can't take it from you because you can declare a higher value. You would have to pay more in taxes on it, but it should still be profitable. The whole point though (according the authors) was that if it were MORE profitable to someone else (because they had complimentary assets or some ability to use it in way that you can't) then it is better for that person to buy it and create more value from it. To take a completely contrived and unrealistic example, imagine that you owned a piece of land with some rare plant that can be turned into a cancer cure. This plant ONLY exists on your land. Obviously this land is extremely valuable to someone who can actually bring the cancer drug to market. You can of course refuse to sell the land (it is your land to do with as you want) but it seems sub-optimal for society for you to do so. Under this system you would either have to pay a really high tax or actually sell the land to someone who can make the cancer drug
You may have convinced me. I was going to respond, "What's to keep the price from rising until I am indifferent between having it and not having it?" But now I realize that would be fine -- I'm not made any worse off.
Remember when patents were considered this grand thing?
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.
I know at least one patent author for whom the system worked exactly as designed. That being my uncle. Imagine the literal bearded tinkerer in his garage inventing a (much) better sprinkler head. What's the next step? Without the patent system, I guess raise money, build a factory and establish yourself in the market? With the patent system, he sold it to one of the largest manufacturers and today AFAIK about a third of sprinkler heads sold in the US are his invention. He was paid handsomely for the decade plus of tinkering, the manufacturer got a great invention without spending a decade on R&D. Win all around.
You're not supposed to be able to patent 'Mathematics' or 'Nature' because these phenomena are 'discovered' and not 'invented'. You can patent a device that exploits a natural phenomena but not the phenomena itself.
Unless an algorithm is observed in nature, I don't really see how it makes any more sense to claim it's a natural phenomenon than it would to make the claim of a machine.
There are a lot of bad software patents. Many follow the formula "abstract mathematical concept, but now it's on a computer". For a long time, that's all that was required.
The problem with that is not the math, it's that it's basically the same as patenting "elevators, but yellow" after elevators have been patented. It's not novel.
I don't understand really why these patents are granted. Software is math and math formulas are not patentable.
The patent (and copyrights) system today is actually subverted by greedy players and instead of promoting progress and sciences is serving to enrich the middlemen by artificially SLOWING the progress.
Saying “software is math” is akin to saying “books are just letters”; the building blocks of software is not what people want to protect, it’s the idea and the effort to invent.
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.
The best of the mainstream arguments against software patents has always been: What does Intellectual Property and Copyright not cover that patents do when it comes to software?
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"
> What does Intellectual Property and Copyright not cover that patents do when it comes to software?
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.
Oh, no, that's not true at all. An invention might not even be possible, let alone having a clear and (literally, provably) correct specification of inputs and outputs. Just seeing that it exists, to say nothing of getting the correct proportion of inputs and outputs, could shave a decade off your invention cycle.
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!)
>FWIW, patents are one of the forms of intellectual property.
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
Copyright can do that, in exactly the same way that patents can. It just happens not to as currently configured.
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.
The application of patents and copyrights to software are identical to how they are applied in chemistry and other physical engineering disciplines -- I've worked with both. A patent covers the physical algorithm, a copyright covers the design of an implementation of the algorithm. In chemical engineering, these are licensed separately, but the patent is more important and the copyright is worth little in practice.
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.
Your wording is a bit confusing I think. Algorithms are not physical as far as I'm aware. Since (pure) algorithms and formulas are different ways to express mathematics, my impression was also that they were not patentable as such. Maybe you meant something slightly different?
Also, do you have sources for the statement "virtually no R&D is done in open source"?
Algorithms are not physical either in software or chemistry. Patents in chemical engineering are essentially a set of differential equations that can be applied to a real system, no different than software algorithms. If you replace “molecules” with “bits”, it is identical to software. Patents in chemistry have no connection to specific physical machinery, they are abstract concepts. The reason software algorithms are patentable everywhere is that they can be manifested as concrete logic circuits and electronic circuits are patentable.
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.
So, algorithms are not automatically (supposed to be) patentable like you suggest, quite the opposite. Although on both sides of the Atlantic people have been bending the rules one way or the other for quite some time.
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.
To be clear, I am entirely in the camp of algorithm patents being largely ineffective in software. I am not advocating for them, just recognizing the reality today.
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.
> The best of the mainstream arguments against software patents has always been: What does Intellectual Property and Copyright not cover that patents do when it comes to software?
Instinctively, that’s where I think it should be, agreed.
Aren't physical machines just math too? We can simulate them on computers, clearly just math, but maybe can't fully mathematically describe the non-idealized versions we produce in reality. Why does that level of completeness of description need to serve as such a sharp line on patentability?
Why are any patents granted? I've yet to read a patent that wasn't just Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and general relativity which are all just laws of nature and not patentable.
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?
> 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.
> The idea that math is "discovered" instead of "invented" is bullshit.
Nope, not to mathematicians. We routinely talk about the existence of mathematician constructs. These things exist and can be discovered, just not physically.
Nope, math is invented, without people there is no math. Math is a logic system invented by humans. You don't have to use math to describe relations between things. Math is a language, it describes real world and is not real world itself. So math is invented.
Nope, math is discovered, without people also there is math. Math is how the universe works. When you describe relations between things, that is Math. Math is notated using many languages, but the real world itself cares not for which notation you use. So math is discovered.
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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.
Nobody's making the claim that Euclidean geometry is all of maths. But the part of the universe that Euclidean geometry represents has always, still does, and will continue to work even when the last traces of Euclidean geometry vanish from recorded knowledge and memory.
> ... 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.
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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".
> Euclidean geometry does not describe the universe, even if it's useful.
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.
Mathematical notation is a language, but actual math isn't. For example, the concept of there being one of something is an inherent feature of our reality, but drawing short vertical lines for them is a thing we do. Similarly, we didn't invent 3.14..., that's just how circles work. We only invented the shapes I just used.
Obviously, yes. Integers don't exist in nature, being an abstraction made up by the human mind.
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.
> I have received neither any compensation nor any benefit for it
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.
I don't think this is the correct description of the situation. Is there any indication that if Netflix pays a fair amount, Broadcom will still not let Netflix use the tech to deliver its services?
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.
Many inventors are employees with an employment contract that says that any patents are owned by the employer and/or they have to sell them to the employer for a token amount.
Supply and demand is fair, if and only if both sides are entirely free to walk away from the deal. Depending on the labor market situation this isn't necessarily a given when the alternative is starvation.
In the West, the alternative is seldom starvation. Given the very low rate of unemployment, despite the post-pandemic climate, it's pretty obvious that people still have choice when seeking employment. And there is always choice, which includes going back to school or moving to a different city. Heck, given the Internet, you can get education for free (until the ad-blockers ruin everything by normalizing paywalls).
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.
I've been very misinformed about how stock ownership works. Can you point me to some situations in the past where stockholders were asked to pay for losses or had to come out of pocket in bankruptcy?
If they were to be partially paid in stock, they would actually get a share by way of dividend. There's upsides and downsides to such an arrangement, I would think.
My friend has a patent that made his company millions. He got a plaque and a pat on the back. He still got cussed out when he paid for his $100 steel toe boots (required for the job) with the company card. He’s an engineer in heavy machinery.
> 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.
The mechanism of freely exchanging the ideas is irrelevant. The exchange refers to providing the ideas to other people whether it's by stone tablet or internet.
I mean, I doubt Broadcom is “blocking” the use of this algorithm, they are just demanding payment.
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.
Sorry, you thought you'd be rich just because you are named on two patents? You don't think it matters what the patents regards nor how useful they are to others? It seems like you don't even own the patents... I'm struggling to understand the point of your "criticism"
In the modern world, inventors often don't own the patents to their own inventions.
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)
That's not true at all. I've litigated patents owned by their inventors. It is true that small-time inventors often have to sell them because they cannot afford to enforce their own patents due to the high costs of litigating against a much larger commercial entity.
>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.
Oh, that's interesting! Very different from my own personal experience in life, and the experience of people I've worked with, as you may have gathered.
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?
What would you like to know? I'm not going to identify the patents nor their owners, as they never asked to be involved in this conversation, but I'm happy to share my own personal experiences. The patents were for a distributed networking system, that included hardware components, to be used in a particular industry. This is in the US. We defeated an Alice motion, with the court declaring that our patents were valid. Ultimately, we lost on a jury verdict. I see many of your posts and find them disagreeable.
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.
I'm sorry to hear that. The story you tell me appears to have two losers, both your side and the side you were suing. I doubt either side was happy to be there. This reinforces my belief that software patents are inappropriate.
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?
>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 did defeat an Alice motion. I never claimed to be an expert on software patents, I'm not sure where you got that from. I claimed to have actual experience in the field and I shared what my experience encompassed and how its distinct from the narrative you weave in every patent-related thread. I described what the patents encompassed and you called it a software patent. It's not a "software patent", it has hardware components.
>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?
Trademarks and copyright are enough to compensate innovators.
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.
The purpose of patents is to encourage disclosure. By disclosing how something is accomplished, a business is rewarded with exclusive use of their method for a limited period.
I think the argument to be made in many fields is that patent law does not necessarily function correctly when technology advances so quickly.
Maybe it's because I started as a chemist, where you look at patents all the time, but yes I've absolutely looked at patents for inspiration, to figure out how things work, to attack certain problems, etc.
The usefulness of the patent disclosure is that it allows someone to write a different document, paper, or blog post that explains how it works in terms a normal software engineer can understand. Without that patent, none of the other public documentation of how to do something would exist.
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.
No, you learn through reverse engineering the software. It's easier than reading a patent, and patents don't reflect reality anyway. No one reads patents.
Easier/faster replication/implementation/new invention etc is the value. There are other people besides software developers that can look at a patent for inspiration and hire software developers to implement it
Maybe this happens somewhere in some industry I'm not aware of? There are many different kinds of documents I use to help me write code, but looking at even just a few (software) patents, they never seemed like they were written in a way that was useful to me?
>I mean Netflix subscribers just got a worse service now.
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.
Seeing the technology and the parties involved, I think it's reasonable to suspect some form of Patent Ambush [1].
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.
If you've been reading the orange site for longer, you're probably familiar with the kinds of shenanigans people have been getting up to with video codecs.
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.
I disagree with your assertion that "disclosure alone doesn't mean much in this particular field" and I generally do not find your comment responsive to what I wrote. It's incumbent upon a potential infringer to do their due diligence. Are you suggesting that reading the face of the asserted patent would somehow not indicate they were infringing? Upon what basis?
Or perhaps without patents there wouldn't be false monopolisation preventing better standards being contributed by people who can't afford expensive lawyers.
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.
There already is no H.265 in practice. It exists, brilliant people spent loads of time on it, but it's useless. What's the fucking point?
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.
Right, but you can't share that HEVC file. You need to convert it to something supported first (or have it be automatically converted by whatever service you're using).
I didn't understand from the title. But it turns out that Broadcom has pantented "high efficiency video coding" HEVC (which I have seen before as H.265). Netflix uses HEVC to stream 4K video. Broadcom sued to stop Netflix from infringing on their patent.
Presumably now Netflix will have to pay Broadcom some amount to stream over HEVC.
There's no guaranteed way to find all essential patents, so when MPEG-LA made the standard they just missed (at least) one. MPEG-LA isn't a government, they can't require anyone to license patents to them for their standards.
> 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.
Unfortunately AV1 hardware acceleration support was really slow. Apple only just adopted it in their new SoCs. Qualcomm didn't support it until recently either. It's probably still years till the hardware support is anywhere close to H.265, or even H.264 (the currently most common format). It's possible to decode AV1 in software, but the computation requirements are quite high.
HEVC is from the VP9 generation of codecs. Qualcomm has supported VP9 decoding since 2016 (Snapdragon 820). Unfortunately, no Apple device has ever supported hardware accelerated VP9 decode, so HEVC is the only UHD option on those devices.
> probably started yesterday or earlier to replace it with something that doesn't have fees to use.
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.
We ought to just stop using HEVC collectively, the bizarre licensing scheme they've set up is just not worth it, and AV1 allows for better compression anyway.
HEVC has a very wide support for hardware acceleration while AV1 barely has any, especially for encoding. That's important, especially on battery-powered devices.
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.
>Following that rationale, why haven’t we kept using H.264, when H.265 started existing?
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.
That very much depends. In browsers, the interface most users use nowadays, that is the complete opposite, where HEVC is not widely supported while AV1 is.
Can someone help me understand how big of a deal this is?
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.
>Is this a global ban on using HEVC to stream UHD?
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.
> Since this is in German Court I would assume it is for Germany only.
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.
I'm not quite sure either, but AV1 seems to be the free format alternative to HEVC. However, it lacks the level of hardware support the latter has achieved, which is very much relevant for TVs and such, seeing as software decoding (of both HEVC and AV1) is expensive and may not be good enough in a lot of consumer devices out there.
AV1 was built with extraordinary care to make sure it didn't use any patents, to try to build a free & clear open technology for sharing video.
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
What do we actually do in light of this ... ? Do we just have to keep using H.264 for 20 more years until the initial round of H.265 patents are expired?
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.
Looks like a good number of the H.265 patents will be expiring in about 10 years now, so maybe 2033 would be good.
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.
Problem: it's up to many dozens of court systems to decide what encumbers what.
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.
This appears to be two different systemic failures stacked one atop the other.
* 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)
> There's an H.265 patent pool that is supposed to cover all the patents essential to H. 265.
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"
How many, exactly? Also wasn't it this decade when MPEG-LA was supposed to be triggering some royalty collection clauses in their licensing of the H.264 codec? Is it happening?
According to wiki, H.264 was released on 17 August 2004. In US software patents last 20 years, so in 10 months the original version of it should become unencumbered.
Doesn't Netflix use AV1 exclusively to stream it's contents? Even if it's not using it, I think that this news will be a boon to AV1 usage adoption as i hope that HEVC will be replaced with AV1 in Netflix.
> Doesn't Netflix use AV1 exclusively to stream it's contents?
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.
> It is "patent free" only because Google claimed it was
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:
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.
At least from face value it seems the value of those patents is exactly to fight back patent pools organizations, at part of the AOM stipulation is that if someone tries to sue over AV1 patents they would lose access to every patent holder portfolio (for AOM that would mean Google, Apple, Amazon and many others tech giants). Though it seems that still won't stop everyone.
I’m all for finding technical solutions for legal problems usually but the issue here is that you cannot keep changing codecs to escape patents because the algorithms are etched into the silicon itself. So it’s basically impossible to have a royalty free encoding, unless you’re willing to use encodings that are 20 years old. This is a legal problem that needs a legal solution.
The legal solution is exactly what AO Media has done: own the patents that pertain to your video format and license those patents on royalty-free terms.
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.
What if Sysvel and Avanci are (legally) found to be in the right and actually have legitimate patents, and refuse to add their patents to the AOM patent pool? (Why would they agree to that anyway? surely individually licensing AV1 patents would be much more profitable?)
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?
AV1 hardware decoding is still pretty rare, it seems unlikely that the cheap SOCs in smart TVs and the like are able to software decode AV1 at high resolutions.
Apple only added hardware AV1 decoders to their new laptops less than a month ago, and to their new phones two months ago. The M2 laptops released in January don't have it. The Apple TV doesn't have it yet, but unlike many set top boxes, it is powerful enough to decode some AV1 streams in software.
Apple is a bad example to go on. They eschew (especially) NIH standards until the point when it's beneficial to them, especially when it's beneficial to another (competing) platform to have interoperability. RCS, PWAs, etc.
> It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes.
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.
> Youtube made it mandatory to have AV1 decoding in TVs/STBs for new devices since 2? 3? years, so it should become more common.
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 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.
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.
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).
The problem with Apple is that they form a significant amount of users, so if you want a truly popular service you have to do your best on Apple devices.
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.
> 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.
It's not like someone else is going to provide them something better; everyone else is subject to the same limitations.
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.
No one uses any codec 'exclusively' because you need the client devices to be able to decode what you serve them. I think the current strategy is that they have AV1 for large/popular media, then h265 and ultimately h264 as fallbacks.
Client-side hardware support is what holds AV1 back currently.
This isn't the German government trying to regulate technical standards of an industry. This is a German court upholding a patent. Which you can of course argue all you want around but I failed to see the relevancy of your comment here.
While I do agree with you and recommend everyone uses them, I still don't believe this is acceptable for websites and that we are basically forced to use adblockers if we don't want migraines
Probably a symmetric escalation. Website uses ads, some people start blocking it, website has to compensate by using more ads, even more people block it, etc.
It’s properly designed if the goal of the website is to deliver ads aggressively. I’m guessing management doesn’t really care about what’s on the remain 25% of your screen.
Curious to know how many days/weeks it’ll take Netflix to transcode all their 4K shows from 265 4K to 264 4K. I mean, it’s gotta be more than 10 hours.
I'm sorry, but why is it that Netflix cannot license technology that it uses? It seems absurd to blame Germany for Netflix's decision to use this technology without licensing it...
The claim is not from the mpeg-la patent pool that is supposed to cover h265/hevc. It's an outside claim.
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.
Well, I don't agree that it's something no one saw coming. Netflix has its own giant legion of lawyers it pays to review patents and manage Netflix's liabilities in that regard. Patents are all publicly disclosed, so I don't agree with your use of "no precedent" or the notion that it was a surprise to Netflix.
Obligatory "patents are terrible and should not exist".
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?
H.265 predates AV1 by a good margin. Also, when they switched, there were not really any efficient AV1 decoders (there is dav1d now in software), and they are still quite rare in hardware today. The power of H.265 came from existing decoders and the quick adoption of hardware decoders, which are important for phones and smart TVs. And your walmart craptop.
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.
AV1 is finally happening but you’re still talking about millions of devices which can’t handle it. A rough figure is 90% vs. 75% but that also doesn’t account for software playback or less efficient hardware implementations causing worse battery life. A couple years from now, I bet it’ll be more of a default choice.
The 90% vs 75% figures ignore the fact that the 75% AV1 support is made up of 72% full support + 3% partial support, while the 90% H.265 support is made up of 21% full support + 69% partial support, so AV1 is doing surprisingly good!
But yeah, that's fair. I overlooked how much older H.265 is than AV1.
And yet another reason why no one big enough to sue would touch VVC with a 10,000 foot pole.
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.
"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.