Comment by pavlov
9 years ago
Apparently Google does IP diligence for AV1 to navigate around patents.
Matt Frost of Google is quoted as saying:
"Obviously, if we have an open source codec, we need to take very strong steps, and be very diligent in making sure that we are in fact producing something that's royalty free. So we have an extensive IP diligence process which involves diligence on both the contributor level – so when Google proposes a tool, we are doing our in-house IP diligence, using our in-house patent assets and outside advisors – that is then forwarded to the group, and is then again reviewed by an outside counsel that is engaged by the alliance. So that's a step that actually slows down innovation, but is obviously necessary to produce something that is open source and royalty free."
The original source is a video, but this quote transcript is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#cite_note-frost-sme2017-16
How did we end up at this point? It's like a self-enforced ceiling on evolution of technology. The tar pit gets more tarry every year.
Fortunately patents are fairly short-lived (at least compared to copyright). A lot of the worst software patents were granted in the '90s and early 2000s and are reaching their 20-year expiration date.
Have a look at recent patents for Facebook. http://stks.freshpatents.com/Facebook-Inc-nm1.php
A patent for 'user status update suggestions' for example. Yuck.
20 years is still an eternity for tech that improves every day.
Does this actually help that much, though? I imagine many of the important patentable improvements end up being obsolete by the time the patents expire.
2 replies →
The "evolution of technology" requires dollars. Gobs of them. R&D thus must have a monetization model. The monetization model used by AV1 didn't exist until relatively recently, but MPEG's patent-based monetization model worked just fine for two decades before that.
For decades, companies like Sony, Sharp, NTT, etc., bankrolled that R&D by licensing patents to the technology, and selling devices incorporating the technology.
Today, the Internet enables new monetization models. Companies like Apple and Google can directly monetize video content through iTunes and Google Play (or indirectly through Youtube). They can use that to bankroll their investment in new video codecs.