The only reason these codecs were patented, is because there was a possibility to do so (read: sweet sound of monopoly - ka-ching!). If that wasn't a possibility, they would still get invented just fine. And that's because they were required to get digital video going. Which was a requirement of _other_ industries, not (only) the software industry.
If anything, global financial crisis has shown how short memories we all have. Market will never crash again, house prices will never go down, blah, blah. Same thing here. Software was being written before it was protected by patents just fine. Innovation aplenty. The rest is just greed.
Posted Jul 7, 2009 0:35 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
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> global financial crisis
And the ultimate irony is that many of the financial instruments that spurred the crisis along were - you guessed it - patented! Such valuable intellectual property ;-)
Why are you so sure?
Posted Jul 7, 2009 0:55 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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If that wasn't a possibility, they would still get invented just
fine.
As patentable hardware solution, perhaps? Sure if the history went this
way free software we'd all used some form of hardware video/audio encoders
today (with analog and digital parts). Whole different world... Better then
current one? I'm not so sure...
Why are you so sure?
Posted Jul 7, 2009 13:20 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670)
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Fine by me, as long as I am free to build my own decoder in software.