commanderFirm quietly boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100,000 up to staggering $4.5 million — backbone codec of the internet gets meteoric increase, AVC hikes follow disastrous H.265 licensing increa
Figures. Patents are the backbone of capitalism. Some say it invented capitalism as we know it.
I mean, I get the idea of patents. If there were no protection of “ideas”, some random person could have one, try to bring it to market but could just be outplayed by a big corporation with enough money to copy this idea and sell it everywhere before he can even start production. They have more resources and money, but might not have had that idea. There should be some protection. Problem is, that these are also abused by the big corporations, so… Maybe we need to fix this somehow.
You should be able to own the right to bring a novel idea into production, after it’s generally available then it should have no protection.
Basically if you come up with an idea, you get to get the first initial rounds of profits to make it worth your while, that’s it.
FizzThere is different regulations all around the world so its probably got enough regulation. I dont think patent trolling is an actual problem im not aware of it happening at a meaningful scale.
A worse problem is AI basically destroying copyright overnight but only for some cases. This creates such a horribly asymmetric environment where big companies are blatantly ignoring copyright while other industries still have to respect it.
BoofStrokeSure for physical things that need prototypes and materials. That is not a thing with software.
Development cost is still a thing with software.
Not really.
I mean it is technically, but software companies have the largest profit margin of any other company in history, that is the extra they make after paying all the bills including developers.
the only thing that even comes close is finance, and it is still off by orders of magnitude.
It is so skewed that it is literally breaking the entire economic model.
Ideas are cheap, and can spread instantly without costing extra.
The indie developer a person that doesn’t need a company wasn’t a thing after the industrial revolution anyone who could compete was a novelty but now you can spin up a factory that serves everyone in the world with a day’s work. people wouldn’t accept it but that’s just because competition is so strong that people are picky.
Software is a completely different thing than physical goods and it needs to be regulated as such unless you want the economy to break.
You sign NDAs with your testers and prototypers for that.
It’s usually fixed with a good competition. No one corporate can abuse the system if viable competitions exists.
But if I had to give some critique, then the duration for USA patent system is one that can create a money grab system by creating a costly dependency to a legacy system that has grown so long it is hard to replace.
whalerossMarket liberalism is not the answer. It’s what we have today. It ends up with the giants eating the competition and using any advantage they have got. Only active legislation works against legal abuse against those that see it as sport.
Amju WolfCompetition only works when the stuff you’re protecting can have competition. If it’s an algorithm that’s objectively better with no alternative, it doesn’t really work.
This is how it was before patent law. The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws. It is about creating artificial scarcity, which is an incredibly dumb concept on our modern world.
You need to eliminate the thought of the big guy stealing ideas from the little guy. This is propaganda used to play on our emotions. Intelectual Property benefits a extreme minority at the cost of billions of lives.
The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws.
lol they also existed with hidden and encrypted ideas to, you know, protect intellectual property…
“This is propaganda used to play on our emotions”
Oh do tell
" at the cost of billions of lives"
😂
That literally has nothing to do with patents nowadays. No one is hiding anything anymore, it is about artificial scarcity to collect monopoly rents.
The fact that you deny that we have already lost billions of lives because of corporations trying to extract monopoly rents is your perogative. It is stupid and ignorant, but your choice.
AnyOldName3The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.
Most patents for the medical sector are built off public research. Companies make minor changes to the formula to extend patents sometimes what seems indefinitely.
Reverse engineering a physical device at this point is trivial. There is no need. The reality is these are legal tools that slow down or limit innovation so the “inventer” can collect monopoly rent.
Software patents are absolute insanity often describing concepts from several decades ago like they are novel.
The entire patent system is absolute garbage rife with patent trolls gobbling up any small business that dares to exist.
There are so many examples such as the developer of X-plane that spent 1.5 million dollars and three years fighting a single frivolous lawsuit over a software patent.
www.x-plane.com/x-world/lawsuit/
The average patent lawsuit, if it goes federal is around $1.5 million and can go as high as $5 millions Patents are a game normal people get eaten up by.
From an ethical standpoint companies exploiting patent laws to overcharge is disgusting and the practice is rampant
There really isn’t a anything positive for the typical person’ perspective. In fact, quite the opposite. Patents are legal tools corporations use to extract monopoly rent. The rest is just propaganda.
ut could just be outplayed by a big corporation with enough money to copy this idea and sell it everywhere before he can even start production.
Which is also why Anti-Trust laws exist in pretty much every country and, when enforced, actually stop companies from becoming gargantuan Hydras.
In the US they haven’t been implemented for too long, of course.
Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.
The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.
Patents are a way to spread knowledge, whole still offering some [time limited] protections. Before them, trade secrets were the norm, and way too much knowledge was lost with it’s creators.
UnderpantsWeevilIt’s an outdated legalism. 250 years ago, the patent office operated as an incentive to record and register ideas to the public in exchange for exclusive commercial license.
Now that simply isn’t an issue
tabularPerhaps patients have their place but software patients make no sense. One big issue is that it is not practical to avoid writing a system that already exists because there are many, many ways to describe the same software system. It’s so bad that multiple people could have patiented the same thing already and be unaware the other exists.
Software and business method patents have always been bullshit.
Patent the machine, not how you use it. Software is just instructions to a machine.
AV1 is right there. One has to wonder why all the device manufacturers rushed to implement HEVC but allowed AV1 to dillydally.
Last attempt to squeeze some money before these formats are abandoned in favor of competition, I guess.
Last attempt to squeeze some money before get these formats are abandoned in favor of competition, I guess.
FTFY
quietly
Stop putting “quietly” in your fucking headlines, you hacks. This wasn’t “quiet”, it was very publicly announced.
CubitOomslammed
Stop putting “slammed” in your fucking comments, you hacks. This wasn’t “the WWE”, it was very obviously Lemmy.
Blast
ShadowVia LA told Streaming Media that it contacted unlicensed media companies during 2025 to give them “a window to secure a license” under the previous terms, but the company didn’t go to the trouble of issuing a press release or public announcement, opting instead for direct outreach. Any company that didn’t respond or wasn’t contacted now faces the new rate structure as its starting point for negotiations.
The patents have expired everywhere except USA, Brazil and Malaysia.
This is a blatant money grab before they expire everywhere.
Big Baby ThorBut you then are forced to move to the US
Thing that bothers me is these guys are claiming to have patents over AV1.
The whole point of av1 is it supposed to be free of this bullshit.
Aye, but AV1 uses math to make the videos smaller, which is the same technology h.264 uses, so clearly it’s patent infringement!
This is why software patents were a horrible idea. We were all warned.
Still, I thought the whole objective of AV1 was to avoid any incumbrances.
yardratianSomafuck the authority, chaining down anything digital because the law is far behind the relative breakneck speed of technological progress.
Here’s why it doesn’t matter:
“AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia),[3] a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors.”
mschaeCan’t be too sure about that: sh.itjust.works/post/57524423
The whole patent system should just be abolished. And if we can’t achieve that, at least software patents.
Nah, we’ve seen what happens with patents. from medical, to agriculture, to automotive to software. The system isn’t working even slightly as originally intended in almost all scenarios and should be dismantled
ripcordHere’s why it does matter
Most server hardware thats out there right now doesn’t support av1 encoding, so all of those, literally tens of thousands of them in thousands of spread out data centers have to be replaced with brand new +$1,500 a pop cards that do support it before they can use it
Most hardware can’t decode it either which is very important. Also it’s currently being sued over patents
Most hardware is only really true if you account for older hardware in circulation, most new hardware will be shipping hardware decoder support for AV1.
On top of this, the software decoder support is remarkable for AV1, libdav1d is a marvelous piece of software, bringing access to a plethora of devices lacking hardware decoder support.
use software transcoding if thats your issue
if plex cannot work at all with AV1, it might be time to move to a non-garbage media server like jellyfin.