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. πŸŽ‰

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[–] Admax 41 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

What are the consequences of this particular patent expiring ?

[–] DarkCloud 57 points 4 weeks 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.

[–] woelkchen 43 points 4 weeks 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.

[–] DarkCloud 24 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (3 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.

[–] woelkchen 17 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] DarkCloud 13 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Okay, pay X amount of dollars to go say that in a few court cases, and hope you get a judge that understands.

That's why it's called Patent Trolling because it's not official or legitimate.

[–] woelkchen 1 points 3 weeks ago

Didn't happen with MP3.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Sort of. That was more of an oversight from a half assed patent filing based on a little known 3d printing process that shouldn't have been approved and is still up for challenge. That isn't likely to happen with H.264. I'd go as far to say that it couldn't happen with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

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

[–] paraphrand 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Has this happened with other codecs?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Parents for MP3 expired in 2017

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 weeks ago

When I first switched to Linux, I was nonplussed at why many videos didn't work. It ended up being a positive learning experience, but it certainly would be nice if the codecs could be shipped directly, as you say.