Comment by mtkd
9 years ago
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.
9 years ago
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.
The MPEG-2 patents are all expired, and it's still widely used (all terrestrial and most cable TV). It higher bitrates MPEG-2 is still very reasonable.
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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.