But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 14, 2022 16:03 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions by mfuzzey
Parent article: The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

They're only shipping software that is useless without hardware.
Other folks only ship hardware (eg the graphics card) that is useless without software to light it up.

This would seem to only affect folks that ship both together in a "complete system", ie pre-installed Fedora Linux?

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 14, 2022 16:55 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (8 responses)

As a practical matter, I think everyone would probably be liable under the theory of contributory infringement. To quote:

Whoever offers to sell or sells within the United States or imports into the United States a component of a patented machine, manufacture, combination or composition, or a material or an apparatus for use in practicing a patented process, constituting a material part of the invention, knowing the same to be especially made or especially adapted for use in an infringement of such patent, and not a staple article or commodity of commerce suitable for substantial non-infringing use, shall be liable as a contributory infringer.

IOW, they can get in trouble if:

They provide something useful for infringing a patent
It does not have substantial non-infringing uses
They know it can be used to infringe the patent

It's clear from the article that the item can be used to violate a patent and that the distributions know it. So the only question is whether it has substantial non-infringing uses. There are presumably parts of a driver that are useful for letting the user use the non-infringing functions of the card, and those would be legally in the clear, but any function that is only used to start a patent-encumbered CODEC would be infringing.

Honestly, I'm surprised the hardware manufacturers can get away with this. Including a CODEC implementation in hardware has no obvious uses except to infringe the patents. Even if it requires a software component to function, it's hard to see how that isn't contributory infringement.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 14, 2022 17:36 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (4 responses)

I expect the hardware device has a license to implement said code. The issue is going to be that the hardware vendor's license is not transferrable to the buyer. Instead there will be some sort of contract saying that there is an assumption that the buyer of said hardware will get a license via a third party or directly from the consortium.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 14, 2022 19:26 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

But if the GPU hardware is just a "massively parallel general purpose processor"? It's the perfect device for running this codec on, but it's quite clearly NOT DESIGNED to run it, it's just designed to run that class of problem - like bitcoin mining, or weather forcasting, etc.

Like I said in the OPUS thread, *IF* we can get someone to argue in court "the hardware doesn't infringe, the software is not patentable material, SCOTUS agrees with us, please rule that running the software on the hardware cannot infringe", then we're home and dry. The snag is, it's going to cost a lot of money to get that to court ...

Cheers,
Wol

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 14, 2022 20:23 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> But if the GPU hardware is just a "massively parallel general purpose processor"?

It's not, the GPUs have dedicated hardware blocks to implement parts of the specific codecs they support, because that's much more power-efficient than trying to do it with the general-purpose compute blocks (in particular I think the entropy coding stage is inherently hard to parallelise and very poorly suited to shader cores) and can also guarantee real-time performance regardless of any other GPU/CPU load.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 16, 2022 7:21 UTC (Sun) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link] (1 responses)

Can disprove this fairly easily actually.

Load up Furmark or some other GPU stress-test program to push the 3D/shader hardware to 100% usage. CPU usage should be near-zero in fact.

Fire up youtube on another monitor, with hardware accelerated video decoding there's still near-zero CPU usage, video is still smooth as silk.

Video decode/encode is separate silicon which is why some cut-rate GPU cores will not have those features, and also why they generally support more decode options than encode: Encoder silicon is FAR more complex and lags generations behind the decoder silicon overall.

If it was GPGPU/CUDA/whatever acronym? You'd have all encoders/decoders all the time on anything that supported advanced enough pixel shaders.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 16, 2022 16:24 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Note that post-processing and encoders (but not normally decoders) do often use programmable shaders in conjunction with fixed hardware. For example, Intel's current GPUs use programmable shaders for parts of (at least) Blending, Colour Space Conversion, Rotation, Scaling, and Color Fill during post-decode media processing, while the encoders can use programmable shaders to enhance the output for at least H.265 (HEVC), H.264 (AVC) and MPEG-2.

So even if you see some slowdown in your GPU stress-test program when you also do hardware-accelerated video decode, this is not indicative of the whole process being done on the programmable shaders - it's just that bits of the process are done by shaders and other bits by dedicated hardware.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 15, 2022 14:33 UTC (Sat) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

To answer your last paragraph, the patent pools usually sell a restricted licence relatively cheaply for hardware that is non-functional without a software component.

So the hardware has a licence which protects the hardware vendors, but not distributors of software to enable the use of that hardware. You need a separate licence to distribute the software that enables use of that hardware, and if you don't, you're engaging in contributory infringement, as is the user who assembles the parts together unless you have a complete licence.

There's also a licence available for distributing software to resellers that puts the burden of sorting the final licence out on the reseller - so that it's possible for (say) AMD to have cheap licences for their hardware and drivers, and to put the final expensive licence burden on a company selling AMD chips to end users.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 17, 2022 23:04 UTC (Mon) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

Fedora isn't typically sold, though, so that wouldn't apply. There's also this decision, which concerns the definition of "component", and which ruled that software code is _NOT_ a component of an invention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._AT%26T_C...

That's related to "component" as used in 35 USC 271(f), and contributory infringement is 35 USC 271(c), but I think it would be pretty difficult for someone to successfully argue that the same word three paragraphs up should be defined differently.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Nov 2, 2022 22:37 UTC (Wed) by fest3er (guest, #60379) [Link]

To be effective and accepted in the long term, law must be interpreted as narrowly as possible. To do otherwise would, in time, make every action illegal.

According to the quoted text, the key points are:
(1) offers to sell, OR
(2) sells, OR
(3) imports into the US

Thus, if one does not offer for sale, does not sell, AND does not import into the US said bits and pieces, one will not be liable as a contributory infringer.

By the quoted text, one who independently writes code within the US and gives it away for free cannot be held liable as a contributory infringer.

But Fedora isn't shipping a "complete solution"

Posted Oct 14, 2022 18:55 UTC (Fri) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608) [Link]

Wouldn’t shipping software like that violate Fedora’s Free Software guidelines?