EFF Launches New Patent Reform Project to Defend Innovation

Speaking as someone who designs codecs for a living, I'm going to have to call BS here. I'll just quote http://wiki.xiph.org/A_Digital_Media_Primer_For_Geeks_%28...

"Digital media, compression especially, is perceived to be super-elite, somehow incredibly more difficult than anything else in computer science. ... This is bunk. Digital audio and video and streaming and compression offer endless deep and stimulating mental challenges... just like any other discipline."

Personally, I don't claim to have ever done anything innovative in my entire career. _Everything_ I've done has been small, "obvious", incremental steps built on top of someone else's work, just like in every other software field. And most actual patents in this space are for exceptionally narrow "innovations" that have very little value themselves (it's usually trivial to accomplish the same things in a slightly different manner), but gain their value solely because they happen to cover the exact thing done in some standard.

The concept is called "patent hold-up". We discuss it extensively here: http://xiph.org/press/2011/ftc/

For an excellent summary of how standards production itself is harmed, not helped, by patents, see http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003769....