Cute kitty
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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What are the consequences of this particular patent expiring ?
On distros like Debian, openSUSE and Fedora, you need to enable a separate repository, if you want icky software, like proprietary drivers or patented codecs. In particular, you can't watch MP4 videos. So, PeerTube and YouTube work, but if a webpage is hosting its own videos, or you happen to acquire a video file in some other fashion, there's a good chance that it's an MP4 file and you can't look at it.
I'm hoping that when these patents expire, that it's possible to ship the MP4 codecs directly, and then at least for me, that would currently result in not needing to deal with these separate repos.
Someone will most likely patent hack it in order to reclaim it, then try to patent troll about it... Because corporate people are jerks.
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.
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.
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.
This is why we can't have nice things...
Has this happened with other codecs?
Parents for MP3 expired in 2017
The poor kid
Nice overview and conclusion right at the top. Last edited 19. Nov, so its pretty active. I'm glad its not named "Are We H.264 AVC Yet?". :D