Bonum Certa Men Certa

IAM Churning Out Support for the Software Patents and HEVC Lobby

Pushing software patents even in Korea

KAISTSummary: The proponents of software patents (for personal financial reasons) carry on promoting HEVC, which is neither necessary nor beneficial; in fact, patents that it is built upon are software patents, which are almost entirely invalid (upon legal challenge)

THERE'S an abundance of free codecs these days. Multimedia can be properly encoded and compressed using Free (as in freedom as well as price) software. Ogg, VP8/9 and various other options exist with similar ones for real-time streaming. But there are those who want to pocket billions of dollars by pushing to the public -- typically through the World Wide Web -- patent-encumbered and nonfree formats/standards. This isn't a new problem, but it still needs tackling.

As we noted the other day, IAM's latest issue (magazine) contained HEVC boosting. see HEVC articles in Techrights (old and more recent) for background on this; it's pretty nasty a substitute if not sequel for the MPEG thicket (enforced by a patent troll). Richard Lloyd, the software patents pusher, was flagrantly pushing HEVC yesterday. To quote:

As IAM has covered over the last few years, patent pools appear to be gaining in popularity, in part because the tough licensing environment has encouraged patent owners in particular to seek out ways to make the dealmaking process much more efficient. In the last couple of years we have seen the emergence of two new platforms - Avanci and Velos Media - focused on mobile technology in auto and the Internet of Things and video compression respectively, while others such as Via Licensing have overhauled their approach to emerging markets such as China.

[...]

However in contrast to MPEG-2 where the MPEG-LA administered pool was the only show in town, HEVC is the focus of three competing pools — one from MPEG-LA, HEVC Advance and Velos. Like Avanci, Velos doesn’t pitch itself as a pool but it has many of the same characteristics.


The important thing to note here is that one does not need HEVC. There are arguably better alternatives that are also free. But given the sponsors of IAM and the general tone/agenda of the site, it's not hard to see why it did another HEVC piece on the same day (yesterday). It's about KAIST, which has become a patent parasite that leverages software patents (that Korea's KIPO does not permit) to tax everyone. From the blog post in question:

A recent announcement by the HEVC Advance patent pool names the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) as one of a handful of new members from that country. The news comes just a few months after the top national polytechnic launched its most ambitious assertion effort to date against Apple.

KAIST’s move to a new pool appears to be part of the latest shift in the fraught ongoing effort to create a patent pool to license patents related to the H.265 video compression standard. Other Korean entities including the Korean Aerospace University, the Korean Broadcast System...


That is a very good reason to avoid both HEVC and KAIST (divestment). Meanwhile, yesterday as well, Robert Jain from Unified Patents wrote about a patent troll called Realtime Adaptive Streaming, which uses streaming/compression patents (i.e. software patents) to sue just about everyone. As it turns out, PTAB may soon invalidate the patent in question:

On April 7, 2018, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,934,535 owned and asserted by Realtime Adaptive Streaming, LLC, a Realtime Data affiliate and well-known NPE. The '535 patent, directed to a selecting an asymmetric compressor algorithm for compressing data, storing the compressed data, and decompressing the data, has been asserted in multiple cases against such companies as Samsung, Adobe, Apple, Netflix, Sony, Polycom, Cisco, Hulu, Echostar, Amazon, Sling TV and others.


This is just one patent among many. There are many more that need to be voided to liberate multimedia. The same is true for other fields/domains. All software patents should, in general, be voided. That may take time however...

Yesterday we saw Abhishek Sharma (not a patent lawyer or anything like that, which is typically the case when someone writes about patents) writing a whole article about the "AI"-type patents, i.e. software patents that are forbidden and not patent-eligible, not even if one rides hype waves like "ML" (I did "ML" 15 years ago, it's nothing new). From his article:

Machine Learning (ML) is one of the hot topics in the technological space and everyday there are better improvements that come up in this field. The number of algorithms and techniques in ML are progressively increasing with researchers and engineers working hard towards its implementation and benefits.

This leads to the question of patenting in ML. Be it a person, a team or an organisation who discover a process, the aspect of filing a patent is sometimes cumbersome and, on top of that encompasses legal and ethical perspectives as well. One wrong step in either of the two, and it may land up in trouble. Although, the number of patents in ML are observing a rise among technology companies, the challenges in filing patents cannot be overlooked. This calls for ML patents to be a topic of debate with critics arguing and providing varied reasons on both the good as well as bad sides of it.

[...]

Conclusion:

In light of the above instances, it can be seen that ML inventions and their patent-filing attract considerable attention from respective governments citing legal and ethical issues. Experts suggest that the inventions focus more on real value and address actual problems instead of just getting patents. Therefore, a lot of thought is to be put before anyone working on ML stumbles across a new idea or algorithm.


Well, algorithms need never be patented; it would be ridiculous to even attempt this in most places (except perhaps in China) and those who promote such patents should be questioned for their motivations; many of those are just patent lawyers or sites fronting for them, e.g. IAM.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Back From a Short Break
We can now resume and try to stick to the usual pace
Links 17/02/2025: LLMs Failing and Patreon Support Becoming a Burden to Bloggers
Links for the day
Links 17/02/2025: Blogroll Conundrum; Research, Scientists Under Siege
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 16, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, February 16, 2025
Links 16/02/2025: Nostalgia for Physical Media and the US Government Actively Promotes Pro-Kremlin Politicians in the EU
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/02/2025:Life, Cynicism, and languages
Links for the day
Links 16/02/2025: Oligarchs "Collect Your Data and Control Your World", Global Temperatures Shoot Up
Links for the day
Promoting Microsoft Windows With LLM Slop
What is the policy at BetaNews regarding LLM slop?
Alex Oliva, the Potential 'Successor' of RMS, Has a New Web Site
More freedom for Alex Oliva
Links 16/02/2025: "Microsoft Is Laying Off Employees" and Internal Dissent Brewing at Facebook Over Regime Complicity
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 15, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, February 15, 2025
Links 15/02/2025: Harms to Health, Public Domain, and More
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/02/2025: On Autistic People, AuraGem Over HTTPS
Links for the day
The Cyber Show (C|S) Speaks of the "Rise of the Nerd Reich."
This 'Valentine Episode' is quite good
Azure is Turning 17 This Year, Still Losing Money and Staff
Hallmark of pyramid schemes, deriving "value" out of things that do not really exist?
Strong Momentum for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as Winter Approaches Its End in Boston or in the Northern Hemisphere
FSF's founder, Richard Stallman, gives another talk in Italy in 9 days from now
The 'Drunken Plagiarists' Are Harming Journalism About GNU/Linux
They lessen the incentive to do real journalism abut GNU/Linux
Female Nazis and racist Swiss women
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Richard Stallman on RISC-V and Free Hardware
Invidious is under attack by Google
Links 15/02/2025: Erasing of American Science and Tesla SLAPPing Critics
Links for the day
IDG 'Reviews' of GNU/Linux Now Contain LLM Slop
It's typically ads or commercials... or sometimes spin disguised as news
Gemini Links 15/02/2025: Spectacles and "Before Sunset", Moving Domains Out of the US
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Only $17,482 Million Left, "Cash on Hand" Sank 40 Billion Dollars in 2 Years
Microsoft runs low on money in the bank
YouTube Layoffs Mean That YouTube is Still Losing a Lot of Money (Net Income or Profit Almost Definitely Negative)
In more recent years Google defunded many vloggers
In Gopher and Gemini Protocol People Abandon Services Based in the United States
There's no resistance whatsoever
Python and Microsoft: Pandas Should Have Known OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft Excel Are Different and Competing Things
now we're meant to think that in order to open ODF files we need some functions with "Excel" in their name
Not Only Windows, Surface, and "Hey Hi" PCs; Microsoft's Hardware Ventures Are a Dumpster Fire; HoloLens Mixed Reality Hardware Now Axed Altogether and Staff is Miserable
Microsoft is in a terrible state
Certificate Authority (CA) Let's Encrypt Now Down to TEN (0.3% of the Whole) in Geminispace
The number of capsules that use Let's Encrypt is, according to Lupa, about to fall to single-digit figures
Links 15/02/2025: University Price Hikes and Copyright Action Against Slop Companies
Links for the day
Slopwatch: All Those New 'Articles' Are Fake and Crafted by Chatbots (LLM Slop)
Google News is promoting these as "Linux" news; they're not even made by humans
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 14, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, February 14, 2025