Made up problem [LWN.net]

Made up problem

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:29 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
Parent article: OpenH264 induces headaches for Fedora

This whole problem was created to cater weird legislation of 4% of global population, causing headaches for all the rest. There's a lot of world outside USA, maybe it's time to start ignoring the outlier?

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Made up problem

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:58 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (5 responses)

Software patents cover more than 4% of the population these days... as many countries who have a statement that 'you can't patent software', will still issue patents and enforce them if enough caveats are added in. They may also recognize infringement of them because of treaties they have signed etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#Jurisdictions

It is murky water for companies to tread in which is why most will avoid it as much as possible.

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 2, 2025 18:06 UTC (Mon) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link] (4 responses)

I’d be more than happy to pay the (presumably small) per-user royalty needed, but none of the common first-party or third-party repositories I know of have a way to do it!

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 2, 2025 21:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem is, as soon as you pay the royalty, unless you pay it for EVERYONE you personally cannot distribute any GPL software that you have so licenced. If you have a patent licence, you have to grant all your downstream a patent licence. And in order to do that, you presumably have to buy the patent, not just a licence.

Which is why the distros don't even attempt to play that game. They'd rather play the MAD game - "sue us and we'll use prior art to turn your portfolio into scorched earth".

I think there were a couple of small instances of that on GrokLaw, and the plaintiffs didn't know what hit them.

Cheers,
Wol

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 9, 2025 23:15 UTC (Mon) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link] (1 responses)

Which distros were defendants in those cases?

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 10, 2025 6:37 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Don't think it was distros - I just have vague memories of patent threats or something, and the resulting threads were chock-full of prior art.

I think at least one threat actor found themselves fending off loads of claims for re-examination.

Cheers,
Wol

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 3, 2025 9:22 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I enquired about it a while ago; you have two choices from the patent pools:

Buy a licence that covers a specific binary only. Something like the Fluendo GStreamer codec pack, for example. This gets you binaries that are "legal", but where you can't compile your own.
Pay $huge to cover all open source users. This is a non-starter for even the biggest of companies - the H.264 patent pool was talking about a figure in the billions of dollars per year, for example.

And note that the per-user royalties are not necessarily small; the patent pools want to go back to the "glory days" where they got to charge a small amount per decoder (about $1), plus a per-minute fee for use of encoders that varied depending on the audience, plus a fee per encoder.

Made up problem

Posted Jun 2, 2025 21:47 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> This whole problem was created to cater weird legislation of 4% of global population, causing headaches for all the rest. There's a lot of world outside USA, maybe it's time to start ignoring the outlier?

And if someone is prepared to take the risk, software patents are now pretty much unenforceable in the USA now. Quoting a (pro-patent) Supreme Court Justice in a Supreme Court decision is pretty much going to blow most cases out of the water.

Dunno which case or when (it was about when GrokLaw died (RIP GL - you are missed)) but one of the most staunchly pro-patent judges wrote - in a software patent case - a concurring opinion where he said that he could not conceive of any circumstance in which a pure program would pass the "eligible subject matter" test.

Okay, we don't have a ruling that software CANNOT pass that test, but we're pretty close.

Cheers,
Wol