MPEG LA Announces Call For DASH Patents 66
An anonymous reader writes: The MPEG LA has announced a call for patents essential to the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (or DASH) standard. According to the MPEG LA's press release, "Market adoption of DASH technology standards has increased to the point where the market would benefit from the availability of a convenient nondiscriminatory, nonexclusive worldwide one-stop patent pool license." The newly formed MPEG-DASH patent pool's licensing program will allegedly offer the market "efficient access to this important technology."
Not Quite (Score:5, Insightful)
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When you're essentially a law firm, it must be nice to codify wealth with the backing and approval of the government by force. Isn't it? It's literally like printing money after you create it!
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One years protection is definitely an improvement, but its still philosophically antithetical to the reason for patents to exist in the first place. Copyright should be sufficient protection, to keep people from stealing your code, but Software Patents protect the very idea, regardless of the means used to obtain it, in a way that physical patents do not.
Patents are designed to spur innovation by getting companies to share their secrets, so that a valuable portfolio of useful arts and sciences is built in t
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For many software patents, I'd agree with you.
The problem with video compression is that many of the patents involved do represent real research, the expensive kind. They aren't one-click shopping patents. They're fundamentally pushing forward the state of the art. The people who do that work are expensive and need a lot of time, so, there has to be some way to pay for their efforts. Google's approach of subsidising all research via search ads is perhaps not as robust as one might hope for, even though it's
Funny... (Score:2)
I can't see the "world" seeing any benefit from this, MPEG LA on the other hand...
Ah well. Everyone already knows how this is going to pan out, the community will come up with a solution not encumbered by patents and gravitate toward that instead, MPEG LA will continue to remain irrelevant.
License-free provides the most efficient access (Score:5, Insightful)
This patenting places a burden on such access, the exact opposite of their declared purpose.
Pure, unadulterated, greedy bastards.
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Pure, unadulterated, greedy bastards.
Aren't they actually adulterated?
How does the _market_ benefit (Score:1)
from having to pay for things that can't by any stretch of imagination be called a genuine invention? These things are the natural progression of the Internet. You might as well try to patent the whole process of inventing things.
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The patent lawyers mad that impossible a long time ago. Given something you want to do, it is nearly impossible to search for a patent that does it in less time than it takes to implement it from scratch. Beyond that, if you actually do search patents you open yourself up to treble damages to every idiot with an obvious patent out there wanting to claim the rights to something that took you all of 30 seconds to think of and another 5 minutes to write the code. The current advice is to NEVER read patents.
Bey
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You might as well try to patent the whole process of inventing things.
Shhh...stop giving them ideas
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What is patentable? (Score:3, Interesting)
Dash is an XML format containing the URL's to media files and additional metadata (bitrates etc). Is there something novel or none-obvious about the way it works that a 12 year old couldn't figure out?
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In other words, it's just the evergreened version of playlists and RSS.
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Let's see what Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung and Netflix have to say about this. They're the ones with the cash to fight this in court.
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Well it's not my justice system...
But yeah, that's screwed up. Laws aren't about justice anymore, it's about being legal to screw everybody else.
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Let's see what Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung and Netflix have to say about this. They're the ones with the cash to fight this in court.
Some of these companies are actually part of the MPEG-LA, somewhat like stockholders as they hold the patents that form the patent pool. Google is probably a notable exception as they are pushing their own VP codec.
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Re:What is patentable? (Score:5, Informative)
You have two sides, neither of which are doing their job because they figure the other is.
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Translation ... (Score:5)
Which roughly translates into "Wouldn't it be awesome if all you bitches had to keep paying us money?".
So many software patents are bloody terrible. They're stuff we all learned about in school, applied to a specific thing, and then made so generic as to claim ownership of pretty an entire class of computing.
This entity needs to stop existing, as they're really nothing but parasites pretending they invented anything.
Assholes.
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I think that software patents could be a bit more palatable if they also had to provide source code that was proven to compile and work as describe in the patent. As it stands right now, source code is not necessary, and only a vague description of what the functionality is necessary for software patents. That means, even if somebody else finds a better algorithm for doing what is covered in the patent, then the patent might still apply.
This very much stifles innovation. Let's say somebody invents a wood ch
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The problem you should not be able to patent an algorithm, and software patents have nothing to do with source code.
Software patents often read as "a system and methodology for doing something we all learned about in school but applied to a specific problem and now you can't do it, suckers".
They're patents on an idea or a solution to a class of pro
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Software patents are not and will never be palatable. They're bad law for at least two major reasons.
1) You can't patent math, and software is just applied math. At their purest, algorithms are mathematical proofs of data transformation. Software is an implementation of that algorithm on a specific set of hardware.
2) In light of point #1, software is also an "electromechanical proof" of an existing, and already patented, device. That specific set of hardware that the software runs on is a patented (and rightly so) invention. To patent the software is to re-patent the device itself, for the purpose that one specific sequence of functions it can perform actually results in data transformation as described in someone else's patent.
Software patents are bad law and need to be abolished, 100%, no exceptions, no sympathy.
Now you have an issue: You patent the algorithm on a generic purpose computer, aka a machine.
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At least in this case it seems to be the other way around. MPEG-LA believes that there are already patents in play here, so they want to form a patent pool to get the matter settled before it derails further adoption of media streaming. The organization's entire reason to exist is to form patent pools to bring together disparate parties and avoid a fractured market where members' technologies don't get ado
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Otherwise known as collusion by predatory trade groups presenting a barrier of entry to new players.
Just because a bunch of CEOs work out a deal to fuck us all over doesn't make it a good thing.
One set of greedy bastards vs another set of greedy bastards isn't good for an
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because they didn't think MPEG-LA's pool charged enough
Of course it didn't charge enough! Why join a patent pool and get some tiny fraction of some fraction of revenue, when you can just sue directly and demand 5% of the revenue from the source?
The Sewing Machine Patent Combine worked because there were three patent holders. When there are 3000 patent holders, all of them want their 5% and the system breaks down completely.
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Fix that for you.
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Interesting timing (Score:3)
This call for patents comes just after HEVC Advance announce a HEVC patent pool to compete with MPEG LA [slashdot.org]. DASH is a complimentary technology to HEVC (h.265), and MPEG LA know it. By offering both DASH and HEVC patent licensing portfolios, they probably believe they are making themselves more attractive to deal with than HEVC Advance.
Nevermind that this patent licensing competition is actually likely to impede the uptake of both technologies.
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Obnoxious terminology (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is the original MPEG-LA press release [mpegla.com]. They really did entitle it "call for patents", which is obnoxious because it plays off of "call for papers", which is a call to share technology information, not restrict it. This type of turning a phrase to be the opposite and evil intention of its original reminds me of Braveheart's jus primae noctis.
HLS will win if DASH is patented (Score:2)
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I can play HLS content in my Chrome browser you mean? Oh, no it doesn't have HLS support, only widevine. OK, howabout IE... no, not there either, that only supports playready. Ok, firefox! no, not FF without a NPAPI plugin - which will be gone eventually. Safari? Well yeah, sort of. What's left? Opera? and no, not Opera without NPAPI.
So what do you mean by "every connected device stack"?
Or go F*#$ your patents (Score:2)
Give us something unencumbered to use.