this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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If I'm interpreting this correctly, many MP4 patents are going to expire next year. 🎉

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Someone will most likely patent hack it in order to reclaim it, then try to patent troll about it... Because corporate people are jerks.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Someone will most likely patent hack it in order to reclaim it, then try to patent troll about it… Because corporate people are jerks.

How? If the tech is older than 25 years, it's prior art no matter what. MP3 is fully free for the same reasons.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

Happened recently with a 1995 patent by a Stratasys, on a stronger technique for 3D printing using a brick infill method.

Someone re-parented a variation to prevent it being public domain until 2040.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 50 minutes ago

Someone re-parented a variation to prevent it being public domain until 2040.

So the variation cannot be used. That's irrelevant for a file format. Some company could, for example, patent a more efficient encoding technique but the resulting file format is still public domain. So at worst an open source encoder would need to be slightly inefficient because it uses the traditional technique.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

This is why we can't have nice things...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Has this happened with other codecs?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Parents for MP3 expired in 2017

[–] [email protected] 5 points 42 minutes ago