I'm unfortunately really unimpressed with the Trackpoints coming out of Lenovo today. I have a brand new ThinkPad that suffers from drift everyday, so it's easy for me to see why other companies aren't including Trackpoints on their products.
There is no good Lenovo hardware anymore. It’s been completely swallowed by the Chinese company that bought it, and even the formerly “noble”/enterprise lines are junk now. Same as HP.
I’d argue it’s a superior mouse even with the drift, even though I agree that the drift is annoying and am amazed they have not been able to fix it all these years.
I worked at Etsy when it expired and the execs got this question a lot. The TL;DR is that the expected outcome is that it massively increases the support burden (wait I didn't mean to click that; wait I actually need to send it to another address; wait I didn't realize shipping was a hundred dollars) without really enabling more sales. So it was a neat idea and worth trying when ecommerce was new, but now we know enough about ecommerce to know that the user has to confirm details of their purchase.
Would having prominent "cancel order" and/or "edit order" buttons and delayed payment processing have sufficiently reduced the support costs for such cases? (I am guessing not since such is an obvious method of providing a fast/easy default with a somewhat easy undo, but sometimes the obvious is missed or turns out to add problems -- like people seeing a prominent "edit/cancel order" and assuming it meant 'confirm/place order' as used by every other site.)
I always thought the physical buttons Amazon used to offer were interesting. The idea is that if you’re at an office and you have reams of paper stored near the printer, you put a button next to them. Then whoever grabs the last one hits the button and it automatically orders more. But I’d imagine they discontinued them precisely for the reasons you describe.
The fact that they don't use it has nothing to do with the availability of the patented process. I don't think Amazon will just say : "You guys can have it, we don't use it anyway"
With emphasis on shit. Really. I can relate to the rose-tinted memories, but DivX and XviD both encode to MPEG-4 ASP which has a lot of shortcomings that manifestly result in the infamous sludgy green-purple banding artefacts of the time, no matter how good the chosen encoder is. XviD is the better of those two MPEG-4 ASP encoders, but it simply does not look good in an absolute sense, just in a relative sense compared to the alternatives of the era.
There's no such thing as a codec that looks good or bad in an absolute sense. Codecs boil down to a quality versus bitrate curve. And starving them always looks bad.
While the most common kind of artifact will shift between standards, significant artifacts are fundamentally bitrate issues or encoder bugs.
If you gave DVD levels of bits-per-pixel to MPEG-4 ASP you could get something that looks nearly perfect.
> There's no such thing as a codec that looks good or bad in an absolute sense.
There are plenty of examples of both awful codecs (software; encoders) and of digital audio/video standards (e.g. Vorbis and MPEG-4 ASP) suffering from material limitations.
> If you gave DVD levels of bits-per-pixel to MPEG-4 ASP you could get something that looks nearly perfect.
No. Not even if the source is encoded by XviD. Not all problems can be solved by throwing higher bitrate at it. The ASP only supports 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which is the largest of several shortcomings contributing to the limited quality you can achieve with ASP video material.
People on at least an intermediate knowledge level of digital video know what a damning problem 4:2:0 subsampling is and how heavy a penalty it incurs on color and clarity. Your comments mostly hold a suggestion that you kinda have some rough idea about digital video. And that's OK.
MPEG-4 SSTP is a very different matter, but that's not what DivX and XviD encodes.
I should have added "general purpose". I know there are restrained encoders for specific situations. Can you list a few of your examples for video? And I don't understand the other example you did mention, isn't vorbis more than enough at high bitrate?
4:2:0 is just fine for video. It is not a heavy penalty. It's OK for you to be rough about this. More seriously, if it's good enough for bluray and UHD bluray then it's fine.
Yeah sure, a few example that spring to mind would be...
Poor encoder: FAAC/FAAC2, the first open-source encoder for AAC audio, produce terrible audio no matter how much bitrate you let it work with. The AAC standard itself facilitates crisp audio quality at low bitrates, as heard with e.g. Apple's Core Audio AAC encoder or Nero AAC.
Poor encoder: Xing, a popular MP3 encoder of the early 2000s, was similarly infamous for producing chirpy and slurry audio even at or above 192 kbps, while bona fide MP3 encoders like LAME do far better on less.
Poor encoder: NVENC, Nvidia's on-GPU hardware video encoder, produce very poor H.264 video even at 8-10 mbps, even on the current 8th and 9th generation (RTX 40/50 series). Good H.264 encoders like x264 is capable of producing excellent FullHD video at just 2-3 mbps.
Poor standard: Vorbis is a good example of a spec whose limits/mistakes make it impossible to preserve certain combinations of frequencies, resulting in brief passages where parts of the reproduced spectrum deflates, making some music sound as if it lost its breath, so to speak. When fed certain "triggering" audio content designed to expose problems in the spec, Xiph's reference Vorbis encoder will produce ringing sounds. Interestingly also the MP3 spec has similar limitations where certain frequency combinations (usually towards the lower and upper ends) will reproduce with quantized amplitude, even when encoded with LAME, though the outcome is nowhere near as pronounced as it can be with Vorbis.
Poor standard: MPEG-4 ASP, being limited to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and PAL/NTSC resolutions. My beef with 4:2:0 is because of how harsh it is on low-resolution content. MPEG-4 ASP being limited to a maximum of 720x576, and the 4:2:0 chroma coverage being only a quarter of that, is the reason why DivX/XviD content is smudgy even with reproduction filters.
On FullHD content a 4:2:0 grid has almost three times higher resolution, which I agree works out on both still scenes and slow panning (the two scenarios where low chroma resolution makes itself most reminded).
Oh I didn't mean to waste your time on poor encoders. I'm sure there's many of those. I mean actual codecs that have a problem, that make it impossible to do good quality.
> Vorbis is a good example of a spec whose limits/mistakes make it impossible to preserve certain combinations of frequencies, resulting in brief passages where parts of the reproduced spectrum deflates, making some music sound as if it lost its breath, so to speak.
So the people that talk about bitrates where it's transparent are basically delusional?
> Poor standard: MPEG-4 ASP, being limited to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and PAL/NTSC resolutions.
That makes a lot of sense, I had no idea it was limited to those resolutions.
And thats another reason why you had two CD drives in tower cases. My 667mhz AMD-K7 had two CD drives, insert both VCDs and nearly seamless watch a movie.
There was the part where you had to double click the media player to make it full screen again however pretty wholesome for its time.
Nowadays, it's just not the same and Ai isn't nostalgic at all.
"DivX and XviD both encode to MPEG-4 ASP which has a lot of shortcomings that manifestly result in the infamous sludgy green-purple banding artefacts of the time, no matter how good the chosen encoder is."
That's the fault of your decoder; I never had that problem playing DivX or XviD videos in VLC.
If anything it would be an issue with the encoder, but it's not. Both DivX and XviD are prime pieces of software but they live within unbridgeable limitations of the MPEG-4 ASP profile. This or that individual may not care about the outcome, and they may use various post-processing to smooth out the creases, but the limitations are all the same real and inherently visible.
I think this was the final patent on it that was valid anywhere, so now the status changes from "someone has a patent globally and we need to consider this" to "no one has a patent." If you're distributing something globally, even one market that still has the patent might stop you from default shipping a driver touching on it, or you might have to worry about court orders at least. It's hard to avoid jurisdictions on the open web.
I thought those were just the closed source drivers from Nvidia, Intel, and so on. But those vendors might have licenses for this kind of patent, especially Nvidia?
Right, but I thought it matters only if you sell something globally. Linux is distributed for free, so the burden of patent compliance is on the user, isn't it?
Not a lawyer, but patent law refers to distribution too. It shouldn't matter if it's free or has a price if they can say you're distributing it to Brazilian users.
Distributing something for free doesn't mean you don't have patent obligations if you do it in the country that patent is valid in. On top of that, many corporations do sell their distribution of Linux.
Presumably it's an "international patent" filed in Brazil.
You don't have to file your patent in every jurisdiction. There have been treaties for recognising each others intellectual property rights since the late 19th century and Brazil has been part of these from the start.
So, I recently learned about this from my company's patent lawyers. Patents only give protection in countries where they are filed. So, you can not create a product in Brazil that violates a Brazilian patent. And, you cannot import a product into Brazil that violates that patent. But, there is nothing stopping you from making that product in the US and selling it to Americans. The whole treaty business essentially means that most countries have roughly equivalent laws and you can file the same patent in multiple countries if you are willing to pay the fees. What countries you pay to file in then becomes a commercial decision.
You are talking about the Paris Convention. The parent poster was talking about the Patent Law Treaty. The Paris Convention made it easier to file in other member countries after filing in your home country, but you still have to file in each country you wish to be covered in. The much newer Patent Law Treaty allows for "international" patents, which only need to be filed once to be applicable in all member countries.
As I understand it (and IANAL), an international patent makes it a lot easier to file in multiple countries (single application as you say), but you still have to pay the fee to each country you want protection in.
I didn't realize that, thanks! After looking at Wikipedia for a bit it seems there are two phases under the PCT, an international phase that is sort of like the main part of a patent application, and then the national phase that actually creates the patents in each region/nation based on the first phase. The first phase is like what I had in mind: You file once in one country but the results of this filing apply everywhere.
So as I understand it you don't have to do the full process everywhere, but you have to actively register everywhere where you want protections. And there is no automatism to the second step(?)
By your company's patent lawyers' logic then, any American drug or technical doodad patented in America is totally legal to be knocked off in Majarashtra or Taiwan or Guangzhong. Pretty sure if you tried pulling this you would be disappointed with the outcome. Not that it is not done (obviously), but that it (pretty sure) isn't legal.
If it hasn't also been patented in India or Taiwan or China, that is 100% correct (but they can't ship it to the US). However, it would be typical to patent in all of those countries at the same time.
I'm going to trust a patent lawyer over someone on the internet. And so should you, if this situation applies to you, don't trust me: get a lawyer.
Siemens holding one of the key patents in video codecs surprises me. I am not technically savvy, but I thought telecom infrastructure or direct media companies would hold the most important patents on this.
Siemens has acquired countless smaller businesses over the years, including some large ones (e.g. Mentor Graphics). It is entirely plausible to believe those purchases included IP such as this.
Siemens started as a communications company. The first invention was a type of telegraph. Siemens had a division called Siemens Communications Systems. They split that into Siemens Communications Systems (public networks) and Siemens Information Systems (PBX systems and such) in the mid 1980s.
The company did a reorg in the late 1990s into four divisions. Those were rail, industrial, power generation, and information & communications systems. That was again called Siemens Communications Systems.
SCS was rebranded to Unify in 2013. Unify was sold to Atos in 2016. Mitel bought it from Atos around 2023. Unify is currently still a subsidiary of Mitel. Parts of the communications division had been split off and went through separate M&A activity previously.
The DCO and EWSD were notable digital central office phone switches. The EWSD ended up at Nokia through some M&A activity. The EWSD was commissioned into phone company offices right up until 2017. When I was in the dial-up ISP world and had dozens of contacts within phone companies, the joke backronym for it was Europe’s Worst Switching Device. It was actually pretty reliable if the software was kept up to date, but there are hilarious stories about early models and unpatched installations. I have one of those stories in personal memory.
Fun facts: EWSD was a joint project in some way with Bosch, ran an operating system, and was one of the major projects in the world that used the CHILL programming language.
Most corporate companies have a (pointless?) 7-year cycle of "we need to diversificate" followed by a "we need to concentrate". That is/was also visible at at Siemens. As a result, the Siemens from now is quite different to the Siemens from 15 years ago.
Farming patents either via filing them or acquiring them was a big business move in the early 2000s. Even basic business on the internet felt like a patent minefield and there was constant debate about patent trolls and overreach.
It still happens to an extent, but we’ve gotten far enough to be in a place where basic patents have expired so that most basic companies don’t have to think about this stuff as much.
I do not miss the days of having to work with corporate counsel to try to determine if someone’s “system and method for data retrieval over the internet” patent could be construed to cover our basic REST API and then watching as they evaluated the likelihood of a lawsuit or if it was an empty threat designed to extract a settlement.
this is a partial misconception, at least in the US
the difference between then and now isn't that the patent law was majorly improved or that patent offices better apply the theoretic bars for quality, intuitiveness, etc. (actually many countries still measure their patent offices by nr. patents granted, setting very bad insensitives.)
the actual difference is a small number of concerns own such a shitload of "unreasonable" patents that they could more or less nuke the whole economy and decided its best for them to put them into a pool and not touch them
Almost true. "Siemens & Halske" startet like that (Halske being the mechanical expert).
By the time the company or it headquarter came to be known as "Siemens" it was already a "mixed bag" company --- we call it "Gemischtwarenladen". Quite early they made already made motors, generator ("dynamo maschine" 1868), insulated cables, locomotives (the worlds first electrical one was from them 1879), electric busses (1901). But also household appliances like stoves. Or automatic fuses and RCDs (Sentron) or industrial automation (Simatic).
Then it became an patent-poacher company, it was by decades no longer specialized in telecom. Yep, it still had PBX (private branch exchanges) and even the Gigaset mobile phones used to belong to Siemens. But that was dwarved by their other markets.
I used to think they were entirely useless, but since then I've learned of many instances where a much better technology is developed because the first iteration is patented.
For example, the Wright brothers biggest contribution to aviation was suing everyone using wing warping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war) which greatly advanced the adoption of the much more advanced ailerons.
Software patents have a similar effect, for example Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol (https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm).
We tend to invest heavily in whatever we can get working first, but it's rarely close to an ideal way of doing something. By pushing every developer to find a newer, better way of doing something, patents prevent stagnation and lead to more advanced technologies.
The wright brothers patent was not on wing warping, it was on controlling a vehicle in the air. In short the Wright brothers did not invent the aeroplane they invented how to control a aeroplane.
"We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes comes within the scope of our invention."
Some people (Curtis) felt this claim was far too encompassing and should not be enforced. But I don't know, These guys just spent a decade working out an entirely new discipline, aeronautical control. And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?
They didn't patent the equivalent, the entire discipline of flying. They patented "angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes"
On my part, I'm not entirely sure what a lateral margin is, so I just answered somat's question which is about the entire discipline of controlling a plane.
I don't think patent law should be concerned with what inventors "deserve" in some moral sense. I think their purpose should be socially practical.
The socially practical effect of working patent law is that it incentivizes inventors to publicly document their inventions by offering limited exclusive rights to the invention. To that end, an overly broad claim to hypothetical inventions which are not actually documented in the patent is detrimental and instead stifles innovation.
> I don't think patent law should be concerned with what inventors "deserve" in some moral sense.
"Deserve" in itself is a meaningless word, a tribal signal. It's interesting to figure out what different people actually mean by "deserve" when they say it (followed the procedure, fulfilled the agreement, expended a sufficient amount of effort, suffered, were responsible in some way for its existence, is alive, has not taken from others, is loved) but there's nothing really there to base anything on. It's a political word.
The real world equivalent is "is entitled to."
edit: it doesn't help that the philosophical area that focuses on what people "deserve" is called "desert." It's one of the cases where where English sorely needs Spanish-style accent markers. "Desért."
What someone "is entitled to" is of course also largely a political phenomenon, a social construct. Just like the idea of what someone deserves it supposes a principle according to which that can be said. For example, ideas of what people deserve according to moral principles often precede legal principles that entitle them to that. But it is only in terms of those moral principles that someone can deserve that, and in terms of those legal principles that someone can be entitled to it.
> And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?
20 years is the midpoint between the Wright Brother’s flight and operational jet fighters. They won the race but it was very much a competition. If Orville and Wilbur didn’t cross the line first then Maxim or Langley would have. They all built on George Cayley’s work.
So no, I don’t think the first one to file a plausible patent should get exclusive rights. It should at least extend to contemporaries. And we should consider the cost to innovation when breakthroughs are artificially constrained for what amounts to multiple technological generations.
The Wrights were about 5 years ahead of their time. The Wrights went about it as an R+D project and calculated what the design must be, while the other developers were doing seat-of-the-pants designs which worked about as expected.
Wright accomplishments that were crucial to making a working airplane:
1. First propeller theory, which got them a propeller that was 90% efficient rather than the 50% efficiency of contemporary propellers. The theory has only been slightly improved today.
2. First 3 axis control system, copied by everyone else. Yes, ailerons are a better system, but it's the same idea.
3. First aviation engine with a power/weight ration double anyone else's.
4. First research and development project where the problems of flight were identified and then prototypes developed to solve each of the problems.
5. Extensive use of a wind tunnel to determine the optimal cross-section shape of the wing.
6. Use of calculations to determine the size and lift of the wing, and how much power was needed from the engine.
All airplane designs trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, not anybody else's airplane.
Very much this. The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments.
Unfortunately in my own ruminating on the topic the only practical alternatives seem to be one or more variations on the scary boogey man of socialism.
> The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments.
The Wrights definitely were in it for the money.
The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement.
> the scary boogey man of socialism
For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money.
Certainly socialism is a heavy and dangerous solution to most problems, the critiques of it are many, and of the many most are fair.
I say boogeyman not to imply it is without problems but rather to say that in the problem spaces that it is often deplored the incumbent alternative is often categorically worse for all those who do not directly benefit from it, which is usually a supermajority at a minimum. Thus, to make the incumbent more tolerable a caricature of an idea is brought forth to scare those who would otherwise support an aspirational idealist into backing the known “lesser” evils.
However the track record for developed countries communally sharing "intellectual property" is much much better. Universities, open source, and public domain all have some crossover with the ideals of socialism.
Yes, communism has repeatedly failed spectacularly.
The softer socialism of public welfare has worked (so far) for many countries including the US. Although I'm skeptical about the future given modern demographics and our governments' choices to appease a majority. The governments of most developed countries smell socialist to me. I'm from New Zealand and most private income/property is taxed up the wahoo to pay for our social welfare programs: it doesn't take much squinting to see my own society as broadly socialist.
Somehow I see people in the US complaining that the Chinese are beating the US at capitalism (regular complaints of price undercutting and monopolistic behaviours) - what's weird since the Chinese are supposed to be pinkos.
As I see it, fully voluntary socislism where people share and cooperate because they just feel like it, works exceedingly well. It also naturally regulates itself as people will just abandon stuff that looks iffy and work extra on stuff that is well run, fair, etc
When you force people to pitch, share, cooperate, etc, things start to don't work out so well and you start getting people that takes advantage of a system that mandates others to work for a cause no matter what, as well as people that will do whatever they can to not do their work.
Ideal socialism is voluntary, just like ideal free markets.
I wonder whether your axiomatic belief is that we should all have freedom? Therefore you love the idea of free markets? I wonder if some of your "free market" comments would be better written in terms of freedom rather than economics.
Game theory and evolutionary stable strategies show the issues of cooperation versus defection.
Voluntary cooperation fails because power is required to enforce fairness/contracts and then the powerful can defect. That is independent of socialism or free markets.
Also authoritarianism and socialism are different things, even if history shows correlation. Socialism is a deeply tarred word, with radical differences in meaning (approximately equal to communism for many, or democracy for others).
If authoritarianism is a stable outcome, then it can be an outcome of free markets too.
Re your other thread: calling China a free market seems extremely odd, and basing any argument on that 'fact' is even odder. Edit: perhaps "Socialism is coercive cooperation" is similarly nonsensical.
Free markets are a component of capitalism just as they are a component of market socialism. China is a planned economy which stands in contrast to a market economy. But China has taken bits and pieces from many systems to create something that works for them, a hybrid that's probably specific to China alone. It's just capitalist enough to be able to interface with big wallets around the world, but we can all agree China itself is very far from being free market capitalism.
Hybrid system, actually. No 100% pure system survived, ever. Be capitalist, communist, or technology philosophy bound. The GNU project tried to expand Unix with ITS editors (Emacs), utilities, ITS'like freedom and Lisp (Emacs and Scheme, again).
For a while the most used editor for Unixen wasn't vi or a vi descendant (vim), but Emacs, an editor alien to Unix. Knowing Vi was almost something 'mandatory' in order to manage servers' configuration under any Unix like OS, and ed on hard emergencies where even the terminal wasn't reliable enough.
Windows needs WSL2 and POSIX compat to be relevant today. Win32 itself doesn't run on top of a DOS like VM having almost a 95% of control of the machine, but on a VMS'like kernel with objects a la IBM.
MacOS itself it's just a Macintosh like UI made from NeXTStep scraps, a Mach kernel and pieces from a FreeBSD useland.
There aren't many pure socialist countries like there aren't many (any?) pure capitalist countries. Most of Europe operates in mixed mode, half socialist. Some countries are very bad (and against) at implementing any measures that directly benefit the lower classes (as opposed to the typical capitalist "trickle-down economics") so they vilify anything that has even the faintest smell of socialism.
> They're always running out of other peoples' money.
I wish people would stop parroting this as some sort of deep insight. Capitalists don't run out of other people's money but they do collect all of it. Ask the capitalists who sink other people's investments with no recourse. Ask the capitalists who get funded from people's pension funds, with "interesting" IPO strategies. Don't turn a blind eye for the sake of a remark which was witty a few decades ago and sounds just ignorant today.
> Capitalists don't run out of other people's money but they do collect all of it
No, they don't "collect all of it". Musk's trillion dollars was created, it was not "collected".
> which was witty a few decades ago and sounds just ignorant today.
Countries that turn to socialism are always running massive deficits paid for with inflation. American states and cities that lean into socialism are all having major problems with running out of money and raising taxes.
The fact that some innovations succeeded despite having to tiptoe around patents is more of an example of survivorship bias.
When we get something working first, there are probably some optimal partial solutions there. Working around the patent means having to do some things inefficiently while being able to provide better efficiency or cost of the overall system.
In my work, I all too often see that the obvious optimal solution we come up with turns out to be patented and we are spending time on finding least bad worse solution. (unless our patent lawywers manage to pussh through a patent for the same thing with different wording, like measuring period instead of measuring frequency)
In some cases it is not possible. For example, 3D printing was held back for 20 years just because of sleeping patents.
> Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol
This seems like a success story in spite of software patents, not because of them. Just because they were forced to develop a new protocol in order to avoid getting sued for using Cisco's doesn't mean that they wouldn't still have improved on what Cisco had if they'd been allowed to use and modify it freely. The lack of lawsuits hanging over everyone's head certainly hasn't prevented innovation from happening in FOSS.
This sort of benefit in software can be realized with much shorter terms. A 5 or 10 year term would accomplish pretty much all the same benefits. 25 years is just way too long for software.
Why do you think it always only takes 5 years to develop some superior technology? 5 years seems like a short enough time frame that a company would rather just wait out the patent than invest heavily in R&D in the off chance they come up with a viable alternative (that now of course THEY can only protect for 5 years)
Having people create new technology to avoid arbitrary legal hurdles instead of adopting existing and perfectly functional technology doesn't seem particularly efficient.
The intent of the patent system is to encourage publishing innovation in exchange for rights to it for a period of time, and then everyone gets to use it. IMO the biggest problem has been granting patents for inventions that at least in retrospect seem non-novel or obvious. I get that there's a grey area there at some point, but "one click ordering" is one that comes to mind. Just because someone hasn't done it exactly like that before, should not make such a simple idea patentable. And I think patents should be on specific implementations, not general ideas. If I can implement the end-user experience of one-click ordering without substantially copying Amazon's underlying technology, that should be fair to do.
>the biggest problem has been granting patents for inventions that at least in retrospect seem non-novel or obvious.
I don't agree that that's the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is that patents are abused to stifle competition by refusing licenses or putting untenable fees on them. No one would have cared about Nintendo's D-pad patent if they'd just put a reasonable license fee on it. On the other hand, a patent like MP3 I would argue is quite legitimate, but putting a patent on a coded just makes interoperability more difficult. If MPEG had charged licenses for decoding chips and explicitly allowed software implementations, that would have things so much more smoother.
It would be better to allow codec patents only on the encoder. Once you have encoded data, there is only one valid way to decode it so everyone should be able to implement that. That is, the general decoding mechanism at least - you could still have novel implementation details.
That's one problem. 25 years is also a really long time in fast moving fields like software, microchips, etc. And the format the invention is "published" as is essentially a legal document, often largely written by lawyers for a target audience of patent clerks and other lawyers, not a technical specification written for engineers and scientists. And the is an incentive to omit or obscure details important to actually replicating the invention.
Why can't the market work it out on its own? People will buy superior products.
Governments mucking around with things like patents only distorts markets in ways that make them inefficient, and ultimately worse. Anyone who thinks the government's intervention improves things hasn't been at the business end of the government.
Well if the best examples you could come up with are:
* from 100 years ago, one that would happen anyway because tech progresses, patents or not
* one that that wasn't correct one as they didn't patent VRRP (which was another open source competition to it), they tried to patent troll it
and both of them were "proper use", not "we will try to make our patent as wide as possible so we can stifle any competition"...
I think the claim of being entirely useless, at least in most spaces is very valid. There are some techs that take years and millions (medical drugs come into mind), but vast majority of patents are just stifling technical progress, and especially on software side
That's confusing copyright with patents. The right to publish Newton's books is separate from being able to apply the knowledge which a patent protects. Note that math equations cannot be patented.
A patent was meant to give a solo genius a way to treat their idea as something tangible, at a time when logistics was much slower and the world revolved around the physical.
Maybe they try to develop it themselves, maybe they sell the idea to a big corporation that has the resources to implement it. Either way, genius begets profit, and the world gets genius ideas... in theory anyway.
But a genuine idea back then needed a long time frame to actually do something with it. 20 years seemed reasonable at the time.
The world is less logistically constrained these days. Make it 5 years, no renewals.
A patent is meant to encourage people and companies to share the details of their inventions, instead of keeping them secret. In return the inventors get protection for a certain number of years.
>The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that
I'm not sure if that's true, or if it's more that 1) we hear more about the more egregious stuff and/or 2) something was lost in translation with that stated purpose when the world went digital.
That, and we're also past the need for geniuses to keep grinding in a cave, in hopes of landing a patent.
People are far more empowered today, many more can work near the bleeding edge, and funding can be arranged in different ways than holding on to a patent.
Solo geniuses don't have the money to operate the patent system, it doesn't work for them. All they can do is sell for cheap or else get bogged down. When they invent as an employee they outright don't own it. That's a moral outrage. And that's what the patent system is to individuals.
Good luck publishing in Costa Rica. When you're not privileged you're likely to be on the losing end. So what use is it? Better keep your invention a secret, like most do, and let the next generation display themselves as the inventors. That's the alternate reality the system actually supports.
The whole system should be scrapped. Publishing is easy nowadays, just do it. Then you'd have the rights of you can prove you're the first. Anyone that wants to use can/must give you a known amount of royalties, depending on whether the invention is a unique enabler of a class of products, or just an optimization. Which it will become over time. If you don't want that, keep it a secret and build company around it.
"Solo geniuses don't have the money to operate the patent system"
Very true, a friend patented a design, that he had developed over a decade, and tried to license it to established players in the astronomy field. They looked at his pitch and just implemented it anyway. Without buckets of money there's little a solo inventor can do.
I don't think patents are inherently evil, however they certainly can be used for evil.
But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game.
It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.
> the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing
The problem is that patenting something doesn't require one to put a lot of time and effort - just to produce few pages of text and diagrams. So it might be sufficient for somebody to have a general idea.
The problem often stems from the Patent Offices getting caught flat-footed with new tech. When the patent officers don't know enough about the field they are reviewing it is easy for things which are "obvious to experts in the field" or "overly broad" to slip thru and cause major headaches for everyone.
It does not help that things fundamental to the new tech, even though they took real effort to develop, are now exactly those items that are now "obvious to experts in the field" and "overly broad" And then have fun trying to distinguish real fundamentals from items in the form of (existing invention "with a computer") Or whatever the hot new tech of the day is.
A good example(old enough to not matter any more) is the how the Wright brothers invented something fundamentally new, their patent was on how to control an airplane, The problem is, once you see it, it is obvious how to control an airplane. Birds do it, Why should such an simple thing be protected? But conversely. This is a discipline that took the Wrights many years of hard and meticulous work to figure out. Is it morally correct to say "No, we are not going to grant you exploitation rights to this thing you invested so much time and effort developing"?
> But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game.
No. it is no way shape and form, good. 25 years is eternity in tech. The impact of the tech is not all that much related to investment either. You are just stifling any competition in the market
> It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.
It has completely wrong structure for that. First, the duration. Second, the way you can patent vague idea, not actual concrete implementation. It is not used to stop competition from just copying your product, it is stopping anyone in market to compete.
Patents are a deal made between innovators and governments. I especially dislike this term "intellectual property" because it tries to turn that deal into a right. That feels benign because the little guy innovator depends on rights. But what really happens is that it turns patents into a sacred object. They're not.
While it would be a bad idea to do so, mere legislation can set the terms of a patent to any length down to zero or out to forever. It's not a right. It's a deal meant to be beneficial to society in return for the government enforcing a limited term monopoly.
I don't know anything about pharma, but having worked in tech and had my share of patent lawyer meetings, it sure doesn't seem like software patents are necessary at all. That said, a patent system has a lot of free parameters that you can dial to reduce the cost. At the silly limit, if patents were only good for 24 hours, the cost to society would be ~zero (though also the benefit would be zero), so it's hard to call that "evil" in the sense of definitely causing a lot of harm. The question becomes whether/when you can set all the free parameters to something worth having.
Our demand for perfectionism prevent any progress. I would consider shortening patent length that can help everyone. With all the improvements in the world we could afford shorter window.
They're a nice idea poorly executed. If they would last something like 5 years instead of 20, and only be assignable to individuals, not companies, and non-transferable, they could work as intended.
I would recommend that great academic (but very digest) book titled "Against Intellectual Monopoly" to understand why the answer is most certainly "no" (though, their answser is closer to "yes" for pharmacetical patents).
I think of them as legalised marijuana. It is not good for you, but if it were made illegal, there will be criminal organisations providing the service. Without patents, we would be mired in NDAs dictating which company can talk to which other company about what technology, and quite possibly several open-source developers passing away in mysterious circumstances.
So I see it as unavoidable evil. The patent system makes it lawful evil as opposed to chaotic evil, which is strictly speaking an improvement.
Software patents may be what saves the field. Currently copyright as an IP protection for software has been rendered near meaningless by AI. If I can get one AI to reverse engineer Photoshop, and another to implement the produced spec, I have a copyright-clean version of Photoshop.
Patents protect the idea of a particular program. And in the post-AI world, it's the idea that holds the value, not the implementation. Implementations are cheap now.
Another alternative to preventing the entire software market from collapsing is to revive the Whelan v. Jaslow copyright standard, under which the abstract "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program is eligible for copyright. But programmers would bristle at that almost as much as robust patent protection for software. Until, that is, the money comes in with mouths to feed and mortgages to pay...
Most large open-source projects banning AI contributions have been doing it for social and technical reasons, not legal.
As for the copyright infringement angle, it’s well and truly too late for that to be a meaningful problem, socially and politically. It’s easily in “too big to fail” territory now—any striking down of the “fair use” exemption claim would kill the entire industry dead, because every one of them would have to throw away all their models and synthetic data and start again, and that’s geopolitically untenable. They moved too fast for judiciary to regulate them, and I think the window of opportunity for legislature to regulate them closed no later than 2024.
You are wrong about why open-source projects are banning AI contributions. While vibe-coded slop is obviously a pain, many are banning even their own well-known contributors from using A.I to write large parts of code due to legal concerns.
I'm sure the patent/copyright trolls care a lot about the "industry." It is still the early days but eventually they will come on knocking.
> Getting media to work on Linux is more complex than you may think.
Not at all: ffmpeg + mpv
Problem solved.
> a lot less feasible for Linux distributions designed to be freely downloaded and redistributed.
> [...] spent some time enabling third-party repositories to get multimedia codecs, you already know what it's like
Well, this was quite easy on debian, but I abandoned being a slave to distributions. I compile from source as-is, using a set of ruby scripts (primarily), not unlike homebrew, but based on YAML rather than ruby classes 1:1 (this YAML dataset is expanded into variables that fully describe how a program is installed, what it installs, and so forth, so any other programming language can also evaluate the same dataset here; I just wrote the first implementation via ruby as such, but I can add support for other languages easily, or someone else can, it is open by design).
What the article describes really is, at worst, a problem for some distribution. But even there it was never any problem to have support for multimedia, unless the distribution sucks. Many distributions suck, but many other distributions are also excellent. Arch is IMO much better than debian, by default. In fact, both debian and the rpm-based distributions, are usually quite retarded by default. Arch, Gentoo and many more, even oldschool slackware, are much saner by default. I have no idea why retarded distributions became so dominant, probably because they were very easy to get going (see ubuntu). But quite frankly, the article really blows this all out of proportion. Enabling support for codecs is easy, even on most of the retarded distributions.
I don't see video patent being a problem though really. The real test step for linux will be the upcoming mandatory age sniffing. People already looked with deep worry at systemd running ahead and supporting age sniffing (see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954). Now the legislation is slowly changing to force everyone to give up their age. Microsoft will push next here, via Windows. You heard this here first.
Age sniffing will come - the lobbyists were all already paid to force this. The big commercial distributions will go force and ID its users.
I dispute "very much". It came out in 2004 and almost all the patents are gone.
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