this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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What are the consequences of this particular patent expiring ?
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.
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.
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.
Didn't happen with MP3.
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.
This is why we can't have nice things...
Has this happened with other codecs?
Parents for MP3 expired in 2017
The poor kid
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.
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.