LWN: Comments on "Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)"

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

flussence — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:36:53 +0000

> Imagine if Google said only Chrome would see 1080 videos, Firefox, etc, would be limited. All for "technical codec" reasons.

That's been happening since Chromium 1.0 (albeit with less aggressive browser-sniffing). Their browser engine has been a testbed for all kinds of experiments Google wants to do in the name of network performance: SPDY/HTTP2, QUIC, bleeding-edge versions of libvpx, WebP support, etc.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

ghane — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 09:55:20 +0000

... but the tax is levied through banks, and we all know that they are evil and rich. Who would have thought that businesses will pass on costs to consumers.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

ghane — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 09:51:41 +0000

Excellent. Let us do what is good for us, the users who are not on our side ideologically can be relegated to second-tier status.

Imagine if Google said only Chrome would see 1080 videos, Firefox, etc, would be limited. All for "technical codec" reasons.

No they don't

anselm — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 23:13:14 +0000

Patents aren't for specific objects. Patents – at least in reasonable places rather than the patent-crazy USA, where you could probably get a patent on blowing your nose if that was novel enough – are for specific technical processes to make objects.

No they don't

nybble41 — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 18:50:20 +0000

> This is why I was arguing that patents need to cover math. ... I can send you a mathematical description of an object, and if you have the right hardware on your end, that description becomes reality.

Not that patents are a good idea in general, for math or anything else—as evidence, just go back and reread those two sentences to see how the pro-patent mindset has left you scrambling for a way to turn abundance back into scarcity—but it isn't necessary to grant patents on math to prevent the scenario you describe. If you have a patent on a device, that patent will apply to the output of a 3D printer just as much as it would apply to the same device manufactured any other way. In other words, the existence of 3D printing has no effect whatsoever on the patent system aside from ease of enforcement. The problem of enforcement is not addressed by expanding the definition of eligible subject matter.

No they don't

zlynx — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 16:57:41 +0000

> We're back to the old PREscribe/DEscribe dichotomy. Maths DEscribes reality, it does not PREscribe reality. As such, they are two very distinct beasts.

This is exactly the change that the future is bringing. This is why I was arguing that patents need to cover math.

Because in the future, math WILL prescribe reality through 3D printing, self assembling matter and nanotechnology of other sorts.

I can send you a mathematical description of an object, and if you have the right hardware on your end, that description becomes reality.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

Wol — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 18:43:43 +0000

I'd like to get rid of Corporation Tax entirely. You need a vehicle tax to pay for the roads, and remember that doubling the vehicle weight quadruples the damage to the road - in other words heavy lorries should pay the bulk of the cost.

Likewise, shared services should be a shared cost, waste disposal etc. The trouble with telling "people" (both corporate and real) to make their own arrangements is that many won't bother, so those who are honest end up paying the majority of a larger bill :-(

Get round the problem of rich people becoming corporations by doing what we Brits do already (not necessarily that well, though) and tax "benefits in kind".

And maybe tax expenses? It wouldn't go down too well, but if you make the company liable for tax on employees' expenses, maybe at one rate below the employee's top marginal rate, that won't impact the people at the bottom much but will impact on senior employees getting paid mostly through such claims.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

jospoortvliet — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 08:05:36 +0000

I like the many proposals for a base income, entirely untaxed etc. And on top of that a fixed (or progressive) tax on any type of income. Any tax system has to deal with how it taxes business vs individuals and income from capital. The latter should imho be taxed strongly as a system should benefit the working, not inherited wealth. But the former is a though one. Ideally, you'd tax companies as little as possible (at least, only as far as needed to pay for the cost associated to their economic activity - the cost of safeguarding their buildings by police, the costs of the roads they need to their factories, the cost of waste disposal and so on). But then the loophole of letting a company run your affairs is opened up - most rich people use that now to avoid paying tax. They 'are' a company, and as they make no money with that company, they pay almost no tax.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

jospoortvliet — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 08:00:51 +0000

Ok, but inflation does this, too, and it is generally considered a good thing: it encourages use of money (investment or spending) and discourages (excessive) saving. Also, it benefits income earners and working people while it limits the income from idle capital - inherited wealth, typically.

Seems a pretty good system to me: rewards working. As long as you have a good pension system, that is, so people who work will get a decent pension.

No they don't

mathstuf — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 20:47:06 +0000

> that any self-aware logic is capable of making contradictory statements

Not quite. The first proof shows that if a system is powerful enough ("powerful" being basic arithmetic; Peano numbers are strong enough), it has theorems which are true, but not provable within the system. The second shows that if a system contains a statement about its own consistency, it is inconsistent (no sufficiently powerful system can prove itself consistent).

Basically, if you want *all* true statements within a system, you must also admit false statements. Or you can miss out on "some" true statements. Generally, the second is preferred.

Now a system can be proven by *another* system to be consistent, but it brings up an interesting thought that the proven system then would necessarily be not powerful enough to give a proof of its prover (since, I think, then the prover would be able to prove itself). So a system can never be proven consistent by a proven-consistent system (since you can can never "tie the knot" without the whole thing falling back to "inconsistent").

No they don't

Wol — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 20:22:40 +0000

Yup, just because "a implies b", it does NOT mean "b implies a".

As for Godel, I think that proof can be put simply as "arithmetic doesn't add up" :-)

The proof basically says, I think, that any self-aware logic is capable of making contradictory statements - that is an inevitable property of being self-aware. In other words, no logic system is capable of proving itself correct.

Cheers,
Wol

No they don't

mathstuf — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 20:13:41 +0000

> If you can prove something correct, then it's maths.

Gödel proved that there exist correct statements that are unprovable in any given system (if the system is sufficiently complex). I don't think that makes those statements not-math, just not provable (from within the given system).

No they don't

Wol — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 20:56:40 +0000

> Once someone implements detailed 3D printing, self-organizing or reprogrammable matter, where are patents then if math cannot be patented?

The problem with patenting maths, is that it is easy to show that such patents foreclose ALL solutions to the defined problem. This is unacceptable according to patent law and theory. The only way to patent maths is to define the problem.

And the whole point of patents is to protect *solutions* to said problem, but also leave the door wide open for others to provide *alternative* solutions to the *same* problem. If you've just patented the problem, you've just slammed, padlocked, and welded shut that door ...

Cheers,
Wol

No they don't

Wol — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 20:52:46 +0000

Actually, reality is most definitely NOT maths, in any way shape or form. (Certainly in my philosophy ...)

We're back to the old PREscribe/DEscribe dichotomy. Maths DEscribes reality, it does not PREscribe reality. As such, they are two very distinct beasts. This can be seen very clearly, in the difference between a mathematical proof and a scientific proof. If you can prove something correct, then it's maths. If you can only prove something wrong, it's science.

In other words, if you can prove something correct, then it's not reality because you have no way of knowing FOR 100% SURE CERTAIN, that reality is actually going to do what the maths tells you it should - and in fact, we know as a matter of absolute certain fact, that if you use maths to predict what is going to happen, you have to use probability theory which instantly says "you can't predict what is definitely going to happen, only what is likely to happen".

Cheers,
Wol

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

nix — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 15:54:04 +0000

There's a reason for this. The banks's models assumed that house prices would never fall, because they had a short enough baseline that in that baseline house prices had never fallen, and the staff were also largely too young to remember house prices falling.

Since house prices never fell, betting on them going up forever was safe, right? Right?

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

raven667 — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 17:14:16 +0000

This whole thing is a bit of a tangent but I did want to point out that it wasn't that the individuals were pushing up the housing bubble by falsifying their credit information, it was the _banks_ that were systematically falsifying creditworthiness information, to get around the rules already in place to prevent banks from putting all their money into high risk investments, because the banks thought that when they eventually foreclosed on the property that they would be able to sell it at an even higher inflated price, raking in interest income in the meantime, but that is not how any of that worked out. The high-risk interest rates were profitable enough in the short term that no one was very interested in whether any of it was sustainable.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

nye — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 10:33:33 +0000

>Quite a few people do claim it as a bad thing actually. Not that it is a bad thing for an individual, but for society

Fair enough, but I think that's a separate issue really because, as you say, it's not bad for the *individual*.

It's unfortunate that the game is one where all possible moves are bad, and the least bad option for a given individual is often the one that's worst for the group as a whole.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

tialaramex — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 10:19:44 +0000

Worse, it went from "comfortably borrow" to "just about afford to borrow" and then "if you lie on these forms you'll be able to get a home, although you won't be able to afford food so you'll starve".

And the result is that we had to stop letting ordinary people borrow more than they could afford, even though it seems like just spelling it out would be enough the dream of "owning our own home" would drive people to do irrational things and we had to ban it in the UK.

We still have many thousands of people who've spent their working life "paying for the house" but were never actually paying for the house, just keeping the loan interest payments at bay, so when they stop paying they owe as much as ever. These deals were explained, they're pretty up front about what you're signing up to, and that you need to have a plan for how you'll actually pay the capital back, but because of this powerful desire to "own a home" people ignored the obvious problems and signed up.

In London the resulting bubble, and the relative physical security of the country has meant it no longer even matters if locals can afford a house, with or without a mortgage, the buyers are foreign, often crooks, looking to hide money in property. So the market no longer has anything whatever to do with who can afford to live there, or anything like that. If smuggling diamonds is paying better this year, or if there's a squeeze on corrupt government officials in South American oil producing states, the money flows into London, seizing up the housing market.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

ssmith32 — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:04:35 +0000

And people will play their videos on their devices, and complain that apple battery life is terrible for that, and some will blame the app, and some will blame apple. But they'll still want their content. Remember when phones lasting "only" a day was bad battery life? We used to expect a week or so.

No they don't

tao — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 19:21:59 +0000

Getting rid of a whole slew of patentable areas seem to me to be a net win, not a loss.

No they don't

nybble41 — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 17:37:55 +0000

> If the boundary on patents is "has an effect in the real world" well then algorithms for video codecs result in video playback via computer hardware which emits light which certainly does have a physical, real world effect.

It's the computer hardware which has the real-world effect, not the algorithm. The algorithm is just an abstract mathematical description of how the outputs relate to the inputs, it does not and cannot have any real-world effect on its own.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

zlynx — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 17:02:05 +0000

Whoever claimed that is lying or very mistaken.

All that you need to disprove it is a buggy phone app that goes into a CPU loop while in your pocket. 30 minutes later you will have no battery charge and a very hot pocket.

CPU use is minimal BECAUSE applications are careful to NOT use overuse it.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

zlynx — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 16:59:22 +0000

> More to the point, it's usual to borrow money to buy a house, and very rarely do people claim that this is a bad thing

Quite a few people do claim it as a bad thing actually. Not that it is a bad thing for an individual, but for society.

What has happened is that instead of housing property being sold for its actual value, it is now being sold for what buyers can comfortably borrow. This resulted in a major shift in housing prices and a vast increase in real estate bubbles.

No they don't

zlynx — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 16:51:08 +0000

The problem with disallowing patents based on math is that all of reality is "just math" at some level.

Once someone implements detailed 3D printing, self-organizing or reprogrammable matter, where are patents then if math cannot be patented?

If the boundary on patents is "has an effect in the real world" well then algorithms for video codecs result in video playback via computer hardware which emits light which certainly does have a physical, real world effect.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

yehuday — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 03:43:36 +0000

not really.
decode/encode of HD videos very intensive on CPU.
from my experience you need at least 2 to 4 dedicated DSPs to do that in a relatively low power fashion and that's wasting a lot of precious silicon

video encode decode will always be HW based, especially with future standards adding complexity to improve compression

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

Wol — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 20:57:27 +0000

But the American system lets you strike first, if you have "a fear of being sued" ...

I've said this before, but if a troll starts suing the little guys, the big guys should strike and sue for a "declaration of non-infringement". That'll kill a lot of the patents very quickly ...

And if the troll says "we think you might infringe these patents" (which is what I would hope would happen) they are smoked out for a campaign of invalidation :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

Wol — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 20:38:18 +0000

> If you have a tax system where making more money results in less income-after-taxes, that's a pretty bad situation. Even if it only happens in very rare circumstances... NL had that problem in the 80's and 90's, which is why they reformed the tax system so it pretty much never happens.

We had this problem in Britain, too. I can't remember the details, but it was something like a 98% top rate of income tax - yes for every £100 gross, you got £2 net in your pocket. That applied to investment income. But investment income had a 15% surcharge on top, so for every £100 of investment income you paid £98 in income tax AND £15 in investment surcharge :-(

But, for the low paid (like me) THIS STILL HAPPENS :-( A lot of our benefits system is based on "for every pound you earn, you lose a pound of benefits". Crazy! and it gets worse - if you have two benefits, you can often lose a pound on each, so as a low paid worker you can lose several pounds benefit for every pound you earn. And other benefits are different, but just as bad - I had a "pay rise" 18 months ago or so - for an extra £75 pay, it took me over a "magic feature" so I lost the entire benefit - £60 - so for an extra day's work, I took home £15 :-( but a lot of benefits are like that - earn £1 under the magic limit and you get everything, £1 over and you lose the lot.

What I'd like to see is two "Catch all" figures - a "maximum marginal rate" where you can opt to pay that on ALL your income, and then that's it - no more income taxes. So the high income people have an upper limit they can opt in to. And, equally, at the bottom you have a similar rate you can opt into (set at the same figure as the high paid people?), and any income taxed like that is exempt from benefit calculations, so you can collect benefits and take home some of your earnings. And then the low paid can opt out when their income rises enough.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

mathstuf — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 18:09:58 +0000

Individuals also tend to not have enough to hire a accountants, lawyers, and finance lawyers to optimize money flow.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

nye — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 12:54:14 +0000

>As you say this is contrary to what people are led to believe for personal finances so don't understand that business finances are a different game. But the reality is that debt used properly on the consumer side can be a good thing too. Margin investment, borrowing money to invest, is common.

More to the point, it's usual to borrow money to buy a house, and very rarely do people claim that this is a bad thing - basically only when somebody has been suckered into buying something for more than its true value. For most of us, taking out a mortgage is the only viable long-term strategy.

The reason that personal finances generally appear different to commercial finances is that in practice very little personal expenditure is actually an investment by any useful definition - either because what you are buying is not an asset, or is one that depreciates very rapidly.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

nye — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 12:32:00 +0000

>In Hungary there is tax...on money transfers

wat

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

NAR — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 09:39:02 +0000

In Hungary there is tax on income from investments. There's also tax on money transfers. Combined with low interest rates, this lead to the situation when you go into a bank, deposit some money there for couple of months, then get back the money and you eventually will have *less* money than you had before you went into the bank... This eventually leads to more cash exchanges, less transparent money handling (more black market) and less tax paid.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

jospoortvliet — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 10:33:09 +0000

Wow, you live in a place where they tax income from investments? That's awesome, wish Europe and the US would do that... But of course, that 90% targets the rich and those poor people can't be taxed much or they might just stop creating all those jobs [/sarcasm]

If you have a tax system where making more money results in less income-after-taxes, that's a pretty bad situation. Even if it only happens in very rare circumstances... NL had that problem in the 80's and 90's, which is why they reformed the tax system so it pretty much never happens. Though, they piled up loads of new rules since then so I bet we're back to a situation where it is possible...

No they don't

Wol — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 12:23:18 +0000

Actually, it IS all maths. If you can do it in your head and on paper IT'S MATHS. If, given the same input, you always get the same output, IT'S MATHS.

It only becomes "not maths" when you start using non-deterministic (ie ALL) hardware that is not guaranteed to produce the same result every time (and even then, you can MODEL the hardware, which IS MATHS, by using probability theory).

In other words, anything in the spec IS MATHS. Any programmatical implementation of the spec IS MATHS. Only when you add the instructions to the hardware does it cease to be maths, and telling a piece of general-purpose hardware to carry out the instructions it's designed to carry out does not a new patentable invention make.

In other words, this idea the American patent lawyers seem to have that sticking a CD into the CD drive of a PC makes a new invention, is a mockery of logic.

Cheers,
Wol

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

epa — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 09:42:04 +0000

Yes, if you run all CPUs at full speed then it drains the battery quickly. But software decoding might not max out all the CPUs. If it uses only 20% of the capacity of one of the CPUs then the battery usage could be acceptable. In fact, I would be surprised if any video streaming maxed out the CPUs completely; if it does so, then there is no spare capacity and you risk interrupting the real-time playback if the phone needs to do something in the background or the video becomes more complex to decode momentarily.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

ncm — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 03:18:08 +0000

Maxing out your monthly LTE traffic cap in half the time vs. Android phones would be embarrassing even to Apple.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

spaetz — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 21:18:55 +0000

> It could also be argued that if you can borrow money on your house at 3% and invest that at 6% you'd be foolish not to load up your house with maximum debt and take that free 3%.

Except that I have to pay ca. 50% income and other taxes on these 6% interest, making your offer unattractive.Interest payments on my mortgage on the other hand do not reduce my income,,ie cannot be deducted from my tax bill (different from firms) so that is not appealing either. In addition, this extra income will increase my income tax rate (yay progressive tax rates!!!) on my remaining income too, so I might be worse off after all. It would be nice if life were easy and things black and white :-) ...

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs (Ars Technica)

rahvin — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 17:35:37 +0000

There's no way to force that. They would simply sue the smallest players in the market for patent violations and work their way up the food chain. This is patent litigation 101 for patent trolls. Use the settlements from companies that can't fight the suit to fund larger suits and on up the food chain until you have 100's of millions to fund a fight against the biggest companies.

Re: Likely as long as they stay the most profitable company in the world...

rahvin — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 17:32:20 +0000

In fact, not borrowing to build a business is a negative in any financial review as it indicates management that's neglecting assets. Several of the factors used to evaluate stocks look at debt load and no debt load is a negative, not a positive.

As you say this is contrary to what people are led to believe for personal finances so don't understand that business finances are a different game. But the reality is that debt used properly on the consumer side can be a good thing too. Margin investment, borrowing money to invest, is common.

It could also be argued that if you can borrow money on your house at 3% and invest that at 6% you'd be foolish not to load up your house with maximum debt and take that free 3%. Though there is a line of thought that risking your home on an investment is poor planning as your home is only one of a couple assets that are exempt in bankruptcy.

Cisco & Royalty Free Codecs

rahvin — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 17:27:32 +0000

Cisco is very big in video telephony. The royalty costs are huge as every phone/connection needs a license. Cisco is actually the prime mover in this FOSS drive for a new video codec probably for that very reason.

No they don't

nybble41 — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 17:15:23 +0000

The algorithms, at least, are pure math. There may be some flexibility in the choice of parameters to those algorithms (assuming there's more to it than "try all the combinations and see which ones maximize this objective quality metric"), but that's a separate issue and applies only to the encoding side; the decoders must be deterministic.

If merely changing the encoding parameters to something slightly less optimal were enough to get around the patent, I don't think this would be nearly as much of a problem. The main issue is the monopoly granted on the math itself: the encoding _technique_, not the parameters.