The VP8 wars heat up ... again [LWN.net]

By Nathan Willis
April 3, 2013

Just when it seems like the Internet is done fighting about video codecs, another salvo is fired. Google recently announced an agreement with the codec patent holders at the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA) that allowed Google and all other third parties to use Google's VP8 codec without fear of MPEG LA's patent infringement claims. The agreement was a major win for VP8, and soon afterward momentum picked up to push for VP8's adoption in a variety of web standards. But shortly after the announcement, Nokia jumped into the fray, asserting that it had numerous patents on which VP8 infringed, and that it would not license them. There is no telling where the Nokia incident will head, but on the heels of its victory in the MPEG LA fight, Google may be unlikely to back down.

History lesson

As a refresher, MPEG LA is a consortium that sells licensing agreements for various multimedia codecs; member companies contribute their relevant patents to a "pool," then MPEG LA sells one-stop-indemnification against patent infringement lawsuits based on those contributions. Despite its confusingly-similar name, MPEG LA is not affiliated with the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which is a joint ISO/IEC working group that produces media compression specifications.

In recent years, MPEG LA's highest-profile cash cow has been the H.264 video codec. In 2009, H.264 proponents successfully lobbied to keep the open-source Theora video codec from being named as a "mandatory to implement" (MTI) part of the HTML5 standard. Arguably in response to the threat posed by Theora, MPEG LA agreed to make H.264 decoders royalty-free for video that is delivered over the Internet for free to end users. That meant that non-subscription services like YouTube can deliver H.264-encoded content to users without the users needing to shell out any cash, but it still left plenty of opportunities for royalty-collection by MPEG LA, including for-pay video services, physical media like Blu-Ray discs, and video encoders.

Theora was derived from a codec called VP3, which was developed by codec shop On2 Technologies and was released as open source in 2002. VP3's code was donated to the Xiph.org Foundation along with a royalty-free patent grant. In 2009, Theora was quite a bit older than H.264, but its real selling point was its royalty-free nature. Still, H.264 proponents included MPEG LA members who both profit from H.264 licensing and make web browsers (such as Microsoft and Apple), and they claimed that Theora was both technically inferior to H.264 and infringed on MPEG LA patents, too.

The HTML5 video codec argument ended in a stalemate with neither codec becoming enshrined in the specification, but Google changed the tenor of the entire debate in February 2010, when it purchased On2 for US $124 million. On2 had released several codecs since VP3/Theora, including one called VP7 that it claimed was superior to H.264. In May 2010, Google released the next generation codec VP8 under a BSD-style license, along with an irrevocable royalty-free patent grant to all of the company's VP8 patents, under the banner of the WebM media format (which uses VP8 for video and Vorbis for audio).

But the VP8 patent grant did not deter MPEG LA; immediately after Google's announcement, the group said that it was looking into forming a patent pool around VP8. In February 2012, it asked for contributions to a VP8 patent pool, and in May announced that 12 companies had responded.

March madness

Despite MPEG LA's triumphant announcement, it never actually unveiled a public VP8 patent pool (if that is what one does with a pool). Nor did it initiate any patent infringement litigation against Google or anyone else. Prior to March 2013, the only major news events around VP8 or H.264 was Mozilla's controversial decision to enable H.264 decoding on certain platforms by passing decoding duties down to hardware decoders. At the time, Mozilla's justification was that its efforts were better spent ensuring that royalty-free codecs would be adopted in newer standards like WebRTC. Indeed, WebRTC arrived in February 2013, with VP8-based interoperability implemented by Mozilla and Google.

Thus, it came as a bit of a surprise on March 7 when Google announced that it had reached an agreement with MPEG LA about VP8. The full terms were not made public, but the announcement said that Google had been granted licenses to the MPEG LA patents that "may be" essential to VP8, and that MPEG LA would discontinue its VP8 patent pool.

The terseness of the announcement led to considerable speculation online; some even assumed that Google had paid a licensing fee to MPEG LA for some or all of the infringing patents. But the language of the announcement is weighted entirely in Google's favor:

... agreements granting Google a license to techniques that may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders. The agreements also grant Google the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec. As a result of the agreements, MPEG LA will discontinue its effort to form a VP8 patent pool.

Specifically, the grant covers all of VP8's predecessors, covers its next iteration (which is already under development), applies to any implementation of VP8 (whether derived from Google's or not), and leaves Google free to sublicense the patents to third parties at will. Xiph.org's Christopher Montgomery summed up the agreement as "Google won. Full stop". After the announcement, Google's Serge Lachapelle elaborated on the agreement in an email to the W3C's rtcweb mailing list, saying that Google "intends to license the techniques under terms that are in line with the W3C’s definition of a Royalty Free License" in the coming weeks, and adding that the agreement with MPEG LA "is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8."

Since patent licensing is MPEG LA's sole reason to be, it is indeed difficult to hypothesize a set of secret conditions that would amount to the agreement being a favorable outcome for its side. A lot of technology companies end their patent disputes with a "cross-licensing" agreement, which amounts to a pact to not sue each other over the patents, but allows both companies to continue to wield them against others. Google certainly has a patent portfolio; a Google–MPEG LA agreement of this form would be plausible, but there is no mention of cross-licensing. If it was part of the deal, it is strange that MPEG LA would not mention it, considering that its business hinges on such licensing deals. Similarly, it is unknown if a cash payment by Google was involved; if so, such a cash payment would have to be sizable indeed for MPEG LA to potentially undermine its own future business interests by walking away from the fight with nothing to show for it publicly.

Another possible scenario is that the primary reason for the agreement was that Google privately demonstrated something even more harmful to MPEG LA, such as invalidating some key MPEG LA patents, or disclosing patents of its own that pose a serious threat to one of MPEG LA's key properties. Cash might or might not have greased the wheels of deal-making. Alas, it is doubtful that we will ever know for sure so long as corporate lawyers roam the earth.

Many in the web standards bodies, meanwhile, were so relieved to hear of the deal that they quickly rallied to promote VP8 and WebM. Lachapelle proposed that VP8 be adopted as WebRTC's MTI codec. Codec expert Rob Glidden reported that Google had also submitted VP8 for consideration in MPEG's still-under-development Internet Video Coding (IVC) standard. Steve Faulkner even proposed reopening the issue of including an MTI video codec in HTML5.

Oh yeah; Nokia

VP8's rosy future hit an abrupt obstacle a few days later, however. As Pamela Jones at Groklaw reported, a Nokia representative interrupted a Google talk about VP8 at a recent IETF meeting to announce that Nokia owned a number of patents upon which VP8 was infringing, and that it would not license them. Nokia put its claim on file with the IETF, listing 64 patents in various jurisdictions (many of which are simply jurisdictional duplicates of the same invention claims) plus 22 pending patent applications. A few news sites noted that MPEG LA's tally of prospective VP8 patent-poolers was 12, and that only 11 companies were mentioned in the Google–MPEG LA agreement; perhaps, then, Nokia was the holdout.

Whether or not it was the missing party is tangential; the real questions are whether the claimed patent infringements are legitimate, and what Google will do about them. Jones broke down the list of patents and removed the duplicates, then called for a search to turn up prior art. That is certainly one approach that might yield results. Another would be for Google to perform a thorough investigation and decide that some or all of the patents do not apply; as Thom Holwerda at OSnews observed, that is the approach Xiph.org took when a similar patent infringement charge was raised over the Opus audio codec—which was subsequently cleared by the legal review team and approved as WebRTC's MTI audio codec.

The odds are that Google's legal department has already conducted a pretty detailed examination of VP8, of course. So it is hard to say what the next move will be. WebM project manager John Luther pointed out that there was never any lawsuit nor finding of infringement in the MPEG LA case. He called it a distraction, and said that the project unfortunately had to keep quiet while the talks were in progress. So we may not hear much more from Google on the subject of Nokia's claims until Nokia files a lawsuit or another surprise announcement reveals how it all turns out.

For the time being, arguably the most puzzling aspect of this latest development is the fact that Nokia is wading into the argument in the first place. There is plenty of speculation as to why—every theory from puppetry on behalf of Nokia's business partner (and H.264 proponent) Microsoft to a gamble that Google will pay the financially-troubled Finnish phone maker to make the problem go away.

Of course, Google already knows if Nokia was the mysterious twelfth member of the defunct MPEG LA patent pool, and, if it was, then Google has known about its patents for quite some time. But either way, nothing stops any other company from springing a similar attack on VP8 or any other codec. In the battle to make VP8 an MTI standard in any web specification, the parties that benefit from license sales of rival codecs have no incentive to cooperate. That goes for H.264 as well as for the next generation, and it is not merely a hypothetical problem. Apple's Maciej Stachowiak has already voiced his objection to making VP8 an MTI standard in HTML5. The agreement between MPEG LA and Google has smoothed over the issue of VP8's patent status, but it cannot perfectly resolve it, simply because nothing can.

to post comments

No One-Stop-Shops for Licensing Technology for Innovations

Posted Apr 4, 2013 3:43 UTC (Thu) by ayers (guest, #53541) [Link] (4 responses)

It clearly shows that the MPEG LA is indeed not the one-stop-shop it claims to be ["Benefits for Patent Users: ... Averting legal costs and concerns"]. Not that there was any doubt in my mind before, but many of proponent of the existing defacto standards liked to invoke the impression, that everything is fine once the MPEG LA license was granted. It now seams more reasonable to argue, that the MGPEG LA offers a service that is fraudulently offering to solve a problem, that wouldn't exist without it or it's kind.

One consolation I see in these developments, is that it clearly shows in a real world instance, how patents are stifling innovation like WebRTC and that these events will hopefully have lawmakers (re)consider more deeply the prospect of abolishing patents on software.

No One-Stop-Shops for Licensing Technology for Innovations

Posted Apr 4, 2013 14:01 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

The article notes that only eleven of twelve companies agreed to be part of the deal. If the twelfth was Nokia, as seems likely, then MPEG-LA can still claim to be a one-stop shop for patent licensing. The normal MPEG-LA licensing deal includes all of the members while Google's did not.

No One-Stop-Shops for Licensing Technology for Innovations

Posted Apr 4, 2013 14:39 UTC (Thu) by ayers (guest, #53541) [Link] (2 responses)

Nokia is not listed as one of the AVC/H.264 licensors so it seems fair to assume that this patent is not covered by the MPEG LA license.

No One-Stop-Shops for Licensing Technology for Innovations

Posted Apr 4, 2013 14:52 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (1 responses)

That is true, but an important detail is that the MPEG-LA VP8 "call for patents" was an open one; responding was not limited to folks already asserting H.264 patents.

Nate

No One-Stop-Shops for Licensing Technology for Innovations

Posted Apr 4, 2013 15:17 UTC (Thu) by ayers (guest, #53541) [Link]

Indeed, fair point. So indeed it does seem likely, that Nokia may have been one of the twelve and the MPEG LA failed to create their their One-Stop-Shop for VP8(+1) and simply offered a deal for the remaining subset of companies that followed their call.

BTW: Thank you very much for this article!

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 4, 2013 6:24 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not clear what we should do about VP8, but it is pretty clear what we should do about Nokia: boycott it. Since it no longer produces desirable smartphones this means that we only need to need find something in the dumbphone-but-works-for-month-on-a-single-charge department. What is the situation in this niche?

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 4, 2013 18:58 UTC (Thu) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

I have a Samsung phone that I got for $40 CAD on Newegg three years ago. The keypad mat has lifted a little (probably this was my fault, though I can't recall why) but otherwise it is still as good as new. It stores 100 text messages before it starts deleting them and can add ~50 new words to its t9 before it starts deleting them. (When I have to re-teach it my girlfriend's name, I know I've done a complete cycle.) Other than that I'm perfectly happy with it.

Because it is so cheap, it does not attract thieves and I can paint it whenever I get bored with the color. Right now mine is fluorescent orange, which makes it very easy to see when I drop it.

A charge lasts 3-6 days depending on how much I use it. (When I bought it, this was 4-7 days.)

Not sure if you can still buy it today, but here is the product link:
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SGH-A137IBCATT

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 4, 2013 11:47 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (26 responses)

It's really depressing just how idiotic this whole situation is. Video compressions algorithms for gods sake. It shouldn't need years of negotiation and grandstanding by corporate lawyers and other deadweight carbuncles on the enconomy to write some bloody software to read (or write) a file format.

We told them and we told them and we told them again, but sadly they didn't take much notice of us, because a point of control (to siphon money out) is just too attractive to forgo, in comparison to a general ability to just get stuff done and make everyone better off.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 4, 2013 13:08 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (24 responses)

It's not the software, of course. It's that they want a monopoly, which means they need both a way to get money from everyone possible for using their preferred alternative, and that they have to crush all competitors, no matter the benefits of a diverse codec landscape, and no matter the harm they do to everyone else in the process.

It's disgusting.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 4, 2013 13:18 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (23 responses)

Anybody that says that IP law stimulates innovation is living in a dream world. Doubly so for people that say that small businesses and individual inventors need IP law to compete with megacorps.

Google has very literally blown hundreds of millions of dollars purely for the purpose of working around legal roadblocks setup by entrenched competitors. The IP law in general is easily a multi-billion dollar drain on the USA economy and is a threat for any company wanting to do business in any area or any company within any area that is part of of the USA's sphere of influence over IP law.

This sort of crap has infected every part of life. Agriculture, art, media, science, software, ... no matter where you go there is these f-ing lawyers with their courts waiting to pounce on anybody that is trying to improve the state of the art through innovation and driving costs down for other individuals and businesses.

Intellectual property? No. More like intellectual cancer.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 4, 2013 23:27 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link] (22 responses)

Its a scheme invented by lawyers to leech of the tech business.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 4, 2013 23:50 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (21 responses)

Intellectual Parasitism

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 0:22 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (20 responses)

Obviously, none of the examples given demonstrate that IP law doesn't stimulate innovation. They're far too small a sample. Even if you looked at every computer-related patent, trademark, and copyright, it would still be too small a sample for that generalization.

To me, the logic behind the proposition that patent law sometimes stimulates innovation is so solid that it would take an enormous amount of empirical proof to make me doubt that it does.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 0:54 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (2 responses)

But there is also an enormous amount of evidence showing that patent law (not IP law in general) gets in the way of innovation too. So whilst the premise is superficially attractive I've come across very few software engineers who find it a 'solid proposition'.

Various economists who have looked at the issue over the last decade or so have concluded that the costs far outweigh the benefits. This is pretty obvious to anyone in software engineering, wrt the sphere of software engineering I'd have thought. Innovation is not in short supply in this field, and never has been.

But if you want empirical proof and real numbers read Bessen and Hunt:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=461701

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 1:58 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

I've come across very few software engineers who find it a 'solid proposition'

Well, be careful to not read more than what I wrote. The proposition to which I referred is that sometimes IP law stimulates innovation. I'm sure you can see that that is entirely consistent with the proposition that IP law sometimes getting in the way of innovation, and I just can't picture normal engineers disagreeing with either of those (at least if you don't limit yourself to innovation that involves software engineering, which I didn't and neither did the post to which I was responding).

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 8, 2013 14:55 UTC (Mon) by uravanbob (guest, #4050) [Link]

A broken clock is correct once or twice (depending on 24/12 format) a day. That doesn't make it equally desirable to one that actually works. That software patents in particular are more a detriment to software innovation than not seems to be a pretty solid proposition and in direct conflict with the purported rationale for the existence of them.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 1:32 UTC (Fri) by Aliasundercover (guest, #69009) [Link] (16 responses)

Where is the hard evidence for IP? There are a lot of people who say they want it to protect their investment. Funny though, there was amazing advancement in software before there were any patents. It is absolutely clear in recent history. Today we have massive consolidation, not the same as innovation.

> To me, the logic behind the proposition that patent law sometimes stimulates innovation is so solid that it would take an enormous amount of empirical proof to make me doubt that it does.

That resembles an argument to faith. Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the side wanting to create monopolies?

The company I worked for not so long ago almost went under from a patent. They had to redesign their barcode scanners to not include on/off switches and replace all inventory. Yes, the patent was on the on/off switch and was upheld in court.

What do you think would happen if you were struck by inspiration and made a wonderful new video compression scheme from scratch? That and a hundred million dollars for lawyers might let you do something but probably not. Most of the value would be enabling others to use it but they would not out of fear of lawsuits. Make that billions of dollars. No one but Google has so much as a prayer.

IP does spur innovation in legal tactics.

Actually I will grant some IP does spur some innovation. We just have 10,000 times too much IP far down the other side of the curve where it hurts more than helps.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 2:15 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (15 responses)

To me, the logic behind the proposition that patent law sometimes stimulates innovation is so solid that it would take an enormous amount of empirical proof to make me doubt that it does.
That resembles an argument to faith.

No, faith is fundamentally different because it lacks the logic component.

Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the side wanting to create monopolies?

The burden of proof is orthogonal to this. Logical deduction counts as proof. Many proofs (anything in math, for example) are nothing but logical deduction. In other areas, we don't trust our logic enough and ask for some experimental evidence as well. Most scientists I hear from say experimental results are meaningless without theory, so the logic actually counts for more than the empirical evidence in stating generalizations such as that IP law does or does not stimulate innovation.

But as for the burden of proof of facts relating to whether patents should exist, I don't see that one side or the other is particularly deserving of the presumption of correctness.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 2:36 UTC (Fri) by Aliasundercover (guest, #69009) [Link]

> But as for the burden of proof of facts relating to whether patents should exist, I don't see that one side or the other is particularly deserving of the presumption of correctness.

You should. It is the difference between freedom and power, between controlling what happens to you yourself and controlling what happens to others. Patents in particular exert control over others taking away their ability to use their own work.

I think freedom deserves the presumption of correctness over power. I should be free to use my own work regardless of someone else having done something similar and laying claim with the government.

Do you really think government imposition of monopolies deserves to start on an equal footing with letting people be? Hauling people in to court where we are in jeopardy for massive monetary judgements and legal fees is just as good as leaving us alone provided the evidence is unclear either way?

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 8:03 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (13 responses)

> To me, the logic behind the proposition that patent law sometimes stimulates innovation is so solid that it would take an enormous amount of empirical proof to make me doubt that it does.

Comparing the amount of money spent on lawyers and lawsuits versus R&D is enough experimental proof. If the system worked it the former would be far smaller.

By the way: do patent trolls make any sizeable amount of money outside the software field? Are there any even?

> The burden of proof is orthogonal to this. Logical deduction counts as proof. Many proofs (anything in math, for example) are nothing but logical deduction. In other areas, we don't trust our logic enough and ask for some experimental evidence as well.

It's only in Math that logic is enough. Anywhere else it's possible to build a perfectly logical model completely disconnected from reality - simply by ignoring some important parameters. It's especially easy in economics. In fact good economists even tend to make jokes about it (and themselves).

For instance the current patent model is ignoring the fact that lawyers, judges and the USPTO don't and will never have a clue about software PHOSITA and software prior art. And the fact they don't want to be told since they would lose a massive amount of work.

I agree logic is not valued enough in today's world but you look like you've gone a bit too far the other end.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 9:22 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Yes there are patent trolls in other areas, but software patent trolling is a high growth industry.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 15:49 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (9 responses)

Comparing the amount of money spent on lawyers and lawsuits versus R&D is enough experimental proof.

Proof that patent law never stimulates innovation? I don't see how, so I think you're arguing some point other than what has been made in this thread so far.

If the system worked the former would be far smaller.

So maybe the proposition (which has not been proposed) you're disproving is "the system works."

It's only in Math that logic is enough

I don't think you're thinking broadly enough, because everyone's life is full of accepting proofs based on logic alone. You buy a coffee maker from a local store based on the proposition that it will be compatible with the electrical outlets in your kitchen. What is your proof that it is? Not experimentation; just a series of logical inferences. And you believe in the logic enough that if someone suggested stores normally sell appliances that are for a different voltage than what is used in that country, you would demand some pretty strong proof of that.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 5, 2013 17:10 UTC (Fri) by Aliasundercover (guest, #69009) [Link] (2 responses)

> Proof that patent law never stimulates innovation? I don't see how, so I think you're arguing some point other than what has been made in this thread so far.

It is becoming apparent you really do mean "any" innovation as opposed to the "enough innovation to be a net benefit considering the costs" everyone else is talking about. People may read your words which speak to a triviality but respond assuming you mean something more reasonable. No one is making a serious claim patent law never stimulates ANY innovation. No one cares. What matters is if it is a net benefit.

It is a good bet LSD has inspired some innovation. Same for crippling personal injuries. Forget about any. If people wrote here claiming IP law produces absolute zero innovation they were engaging in hyperbole.

The IP law we have is doing harm as its costs greatly exceed its benefits.

Where is the evidence patents are a net benefit in software? Before software patents we had a field with the most dramatic innovative explosion of modern times. Our society received huge benefits, many people earned a good living while others became rich, all in an unusually open field. Now with software patents we have dramatic consolidation, less innovation coming from less players.

Please do tell us about all the stagnant industries which become innovative and vibrant once patents came in to wide use. Logic and faith do indeed overlap in an important way. Too often people think they remove the need for objective observation of the real world.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 6, 2013 16:22 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

It is becoming apparent you really do mean "any" innovation as opposed to the "enough innovation to be a net benefit considering the costs" everyone else is talking about.

Everyone except possibly one, who explicitly said, "Anybody that says that IP law stimulates innovation is living in a dream world." While that author may have meant, "... enough innovation to be a net benefit," it's easy for someone to assume the author wrote what he meant, and I wanted to make sure readers don't think that it is generally agreed that patents have no up side, or that LWN readers are so simple that they can't see two sides to an issue.

Given that you figured out that I meant only what I wrote when I said patents stimulate innovation, I don't know what to make of the additional four paragraphs fighting the straw man who thinks patents are great.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 7, 2013 14:59 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

While that author may have meant, "... enough innovation to be a net benefit," it's easy for someone to assume the author wrote what he meant, and I wanted to make sure readers don't think that it is generally agreed that patents have no up side, or that LWN readers are so simple that they can't see two sides to an issue.

It is actually possible to refute that "IP law stimulates innovation" by comparing the normal level of innovation with that under the observed legal regime. Even if individuals or organisations are encouraged to innovate by the availability of monopoly grants, if the general level of innovation decreases, any claim of the benefits of the "IP law" in question can be refuted at the most pertinent level of discussion.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 8, 2013 7:23 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (5 responses)

It is experimentation; after many, many years of buying electrical appliances, I know they invariably fit my plugs. If we were following logic, we might likewise assume that washers and driers plugged into standard plugs (they often need 220v), or that portable electronic tools had some sort of standard charger plug (hah!).

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 8, 2013 17:56 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (4 responses)

I suppose it's possible you reason out whether to buy a coffee maker that way ("Every time I've bought an appliance before, it had a standard plug, so I'll assume it's always that way"), but I suspect most people who think to ask the question answer it with a syllogism such as, "this store would not be in business if it sold things people can't use; the store is still in business; etc."). I know that's how I make decisions like that.

Imagine that you've lived in the US all your life and then move to the UK. All the evidence you have is that stores sell appliances with North American plugs. So do you assume a UK store does too? Do you do demand evidence to the contrary before you'll risk buying a coffee maker you can't use? Or do you take the risk based only on a logical deduction that suggests UK stores sell coffee makers that work in UK kitchens?

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 9, 2013 1:12 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (3 responses)

"this store would not be in business if it sold things people can't use"

That's not logic; there's a lot of experience and facts behind that. It certainly wasn't true in the Soviet Union, for example. And as per the examples that follow, it's a leap to assume that that means the plugs are compatible.

Why is that I figure that a washer or dryer won't plug into the standard sockets? Why is that I don't figure I can buy an arbitrary charger and expect it to work with my electronic device? Why don't I figure I can buy an arbitrary video game and have it work in my system? Why can't I buy a movie disc and assume that it will work in my DVD player?

If I thought about it in terms of "North American plugs", I'd probably already know what type of plugs the UK uses. I assume, as a First World nation, that the UK is consistent in the type of plugs they use. On the other hand, I bet you should look twice in Hong Kong; are they Chinese plugs or UK plugs? I suspect there's many other places where you should look twice and keep adapters on hand.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 9, 2013 2:23 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

You're pointing out that all logical conclusions about the real world can be traced back to observations (evidence), and that all conclusions based on evidence are actually an application of logic to that evidence.

So the distinction between believing something based on logic and believing it based on evidence is only a matter of degree of the remoteness of the evidence.

Based on your categorizing the conclusion that a coffee maker will or will not work in a particular kitchen as an evidence-based conclusion, then my conclusion that patents stimulate innovation is also evidence-based, though I originally said it was not. A lifetime of seeing what greed makes people do, of seeing things cost money, of seeing people use other people's inventions, and on and on lead me to that conclusion.

I believe someone said at one point there is "no evidence" that patents stimulate innovation, which I took to refer to more direct evidence, with less logical deduction required, than the above.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 9, 2013 6:11 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Now I'm tempted to go and look for some lawyer community web site. There's a chance they have forums with discussions more interesting than this one :-)

A first world nation is consistent ...

Posted Apr 11, 2013 12:26 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

You haven't been following the Japanese Tsunami then :-)

One of the big problems they had was they have two different electrical standards, and it was one side was mostly wiped out. So they couldn't feed power across the island from the other side because both the volts and the hertz were different.

Cheers,
Wol

It's only in Math that logic is enough.

Posted Apr 11, 2013 11:59 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not enough even there!

As soon as you start doing arithmetic you have to start acting on faith.

Godel has shown that, as I like to put it, "you can have complete, consistent, or adds up. Pick any two". You have to take it on faith that arithmetic works, because Godel has shown it's unprovable.

Cheers,
Wol

It's only in Math that logic is enough.

Posted Apr 11, 2013 16:17 UTC (Thu) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

> Godel has shown that, as I like to put it, "you can have complete, consistent, or adds up. Pick any two". You have to take it on faith that arithmetic works, because Godel has shown it's unprovable.

Well, given those choices you'd always pick "consistent and adds up". But Gödel went one further and said that you can prove consistency if and only if your system is inconsistent.

So you don't even get to choose.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 9, 2013 22:00 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

<i>Video compressions algorithms for gods sake.</i>

Yes, it's nowhere easier to see that these are mathematics -- and ALL these patents were therefore granted illegally.

It's depressing that the USPTO isn't under criminal investigation for large scale fraud.

The VP8 wars heat up ... again

Posted Apr 10, 2013 14:46 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link]

Sad to see Maciej from Apple using Mozilla's decision to semi-support h264 in exactly the way we feared in the linked to message to the HTML5 standards list: "since the first round of HTML baseline codec debates, every major browser has gotten on board with shipping H.264. Given that interop is coming to exist de facto, why do we need to declare a baseline at all". So anybody can create and distribute a free and functional web browser without fear, perhaps? (Technically while software patents remain there is still some legitimate fear of lawsuits, but we should seek to minimise it.)

Do these people really not get that, or are they just trying to deceive people?