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Theora Ahead of H.264 In Objective PSNR Quality
bigmammoth writes "Xiph hackers have been hard at work improving the Theora codec over the past year, with the latest versions gaining on and passing h.264 in objective PSNR quality measurements. From the update: 'Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling ahead of h.264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.'
Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impending launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top-4 web site. It's looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the h.264 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of h.264 in 2010."
If they pretend it is going to be free until people get locked in, then pull the pay me or get sued stunt.... then yes.
This might not pose that much of a threat to H264, sounds like another OGG or FLAC. Superior in a lot of qualities but largely ignored by the majority
Unless some major device manufacturers or youtube like heavyweights get behind it, it's gonna be pretty much limited to the geek community.
Software patents should all be invalid.
There are numerous and completely independent ways for people to construct software that does the same thing. Software and data compatibility is far more important that limiting what programmers can write independently without also being required to research whether or not their work is already covered under a patent somewhere.
And to be clear, what software patents do most often is PREVENT people from being paid for their original work or at the very least allow some otherwise uninvolved party to come in and tax your ability to market your work if not block it entirely.
Software protected by copyright? I'm not entirely down with that but it makes a lot more sense than patenting software.
The vast majority of the streaming is flash encapsulated. The host can use any codec they want and it is transparent to the client. By doing this, the client never notices, and they don't pay royalties. It's more likely than you think.
Sure, Theora is great, so is OGG Vorbis and FLAC... Unfortunately I can't really play any of those formats save for on my computer, and if I'm using something other than Linux, I most likely will have to install extra software in order to play them. So no, I don't think this will be some big improvement until I can play them on everything without extra software.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
if your laying out cash on infrastructure i'd say it serves you right for not doing your homework first.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
H.264 is a specification, not a codec.
There are various codec implementations of it.
x.264 being the most popular.
Main Concept being the best overall.
Nero being one of the first to market and as usual being slow and bloated and buggy.
DivX as usual being late to market but driving the push for playback in embedded devices, while being at the top in terms of quality and decoding speed.
your making zero sense. the free codec's are willingly given away for free, where here /. is yet again wailing when they have to pay for something.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
test versions of Thusnelda pulling ahead of h264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases
Please tell me that's not an actual product name.
sic transit gloria mundi
What software agreement? I think that they are licensing patents. They have merely said that you don't have to pay to use the patents before 2010, but if you use the patents after that, you may need to pay (depending on volume). Yes, products that have shipped will be safe, but most companies want to continue shipping products, which will be affected by the royalty demands.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
do you really hate paying people for their work that much?
It depends how much...
Im happy to pay people how much i think their work is worth to me, but only a victim would pay what a capitalist says their work is worth.
I don't mean to belittle Theora, I've really been rooting for them over the years. And this recent test does look fantastic.
But I can't help wonder what settings they are testing x264 with. x264 has recently been shown to be highly sensitive to clips like the Akiyo one tested here -- it also lost to some other H.264 encoders that it usually beats fairly consistently. The version and settings used to encode this one make a WORLD of difference.
"...even if there was a clause in there stating "we can change this at anytime"..."
That's *exactly* what's in the MPEG licenses. And software vendors don't get indefinite licenses for distributing MPEG implementations, they have to reup on a regular basis.
Since the last update and alpha release, work has centered on two basic tasks: correcting the substantial energy leakage in Theora's forward DCT and optimization of the quantization matricies (and matrix selection). Here's an early example of Thusnelda with some early quant matrix tuning, along with the new forward DCT versus Theora 1.0 discussed below (same encoder parameters, equal bitrates):
Greg Maxwell has been doing automated regression and comparison testing of the ongoing Thusnelda work against previous versions of Theora, and because there's so much anecdotal FUD flying around about Thusnelda and (especially) h264, he threw h264 (the x264 encoder) into the testing mix too. The following PSNR chart is data collected against the 'Akiyo' QCIF test clip:
X axis is kbps, Y axis is PSNR in dB
The important thing to note is that objective error steadily decreases from Theora, to the SVN version of Thusnelda, to the early experimental Thusnelda work that includes some matrix optimization (but not yet adaptive quantization). Also worth noting is that something is very very wrong with Theora support in older versions of ffmpeg, which for some reason, outside reviewers insist on using to compare Theora against other codecs. The bug is not actually in ffmpeg2theora; the same ffmpeg2theora version linked against a recent ffmpeg does not exhibit the same problem.
Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling *ahead* of x264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantianlly before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.
Forward DCT
The original VP3 was designed with a forward/inverse DCT pair without perfect reconstruction that exhibits substantial and highly nonuniform energy leakage. It appears that the only real consideration in the design and implementation of the original transform pair was speed on a single platform [a classic case of premature optimization].
Original transform error
The peak and mean square error charts (values arranged by position in the 8x8 output matrix) make clear just how poor the original forward DCT is. (This is an excerpt from the full test and is representative of the results across all input conditions)):
IEEE1180-1990 test results (VP3):
Input range: [-256,255]
Sign: 1
Iterations: 10000
Peak absolute values of errors:
3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Worst peak error = 3 (FAILS spec limit 1)
Mean square errors:
2.1289 0.9616 0.6611 0.3385 0.3458 0.6426 0.5268 0.3499
0.4746 0.6312 0.6130 0.4239 0.4310 0.6287 0.6312 0.4315
0.4706 0.6238 0.6300 0.4228 0.4159 0.6278 0.6357 0.4191
0.3642 0.5461 0.5286 0.3527 0.3467 0.5368 0.5413 0.3405
0.3483 0.5285 0.5463 0.3531 0.3499 0.5389 0.5294 0.3421
0.4331 0.6090 0.6244 0.4272 0.4218 0.6296 0.6172 0.4209
0.4164 0.6225 0.6191 0.4248 0.4285 0.6206 0.6331 0.4269
0.3419 0.5315 0.5428 0.3586 0.3560 0.5299 0.5390 0.3482
Worst pmse = 2.128900 (FAILS spec limit 0.06)
Overall mse = 0.523162 (FAILS spec limit 0.02)
Improved transform
A
my reading was $10,000 per year per local market service... assuming your internet services hits many thousands of local markets you would hit the maximum royalty for Participation ie millions. This may be an inaccurate reading. Your reading seems logical as well.
No royalties were levied on mp3 implementations until MPEG changed their minds in 1998, ironically not long after the format really took off, and delivered Cease-and-Desists to every free encoder project and a bunch of companies too.
"Thanks, boys, for promoting our format for us. We thought it was only good for hold music over ISDN! Since you did such a fabulous job, we're gonna have to ask you to hand everything over right fucking now or we sue you into oblivion. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."
Don't you remember that was the whole reason Ogg and Vorbis got started? We just had Unisys/GIF threaten to sue everyone, then we had MPEG threatening to sue everyone and someone finally had the guts to say no fucking more. MPEG can't even keep its own members from suing each other, and you plan to trust them for the basis of your own smaller business?
But one thing is funny, MPEG has mostly (mostly) behaved since then. Maybe MPEG is only playing fair now *because* of Ogg? Ogg is pretty much the only viable non-MPEG codec effort left.
Nope, and as a developer for Internet Explorer, I thought I'd heard of every image format already!
How are they pretending? The linked license agreement explicitly states the term of the agreement, and even notes that some activites are royalty-free until then *for the express purpose of increasing market share*. It's not a bait-and-switch if they inform you about the switch ahead of time.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized.
How does being in the license agreement itself count as "not heavily publicized?" C'mon, people... anyone who signs a legal agreement like a patent license without having a lawyer look over it is a moron.
It's not bait and switch if they tell you about the switch up front.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
I'm less worried about benchmarks, more worried about, you know, seeing an actual production, ready for end-user codec released. This only finally happened end of 2008 to all of no fanfare (I didn't see it on /. or anywhere). That is a loooong time they've been messing with it (2001 was when VP3 with open).
The problem is, if you take forever to make it "perfect" you miss the boat. The reason MP3 got so popular is not because it was the first compressed music standard capable of near CD quality. It was also not because it is the best lossy compression standard. It is because it was good enough, at the right time. It's compression level was small enough that people found it usable (as opposed to things like ADPCM which do knock the size down, but not enough) on the technology of the day, and it did it while giving quality good enough people liked it.
So in my opinion it really is to late, they needed to release a couple years ago. As it stands, I think they've missed the boat. Blu-ray is done and uses VC-1, MPEG-4, and MPEG-2, ATSC is done, uses MPEG-2, Flash Video uses H.263 and VP6 (and also H.264), mobile stuff uses MPEG-4 (part 2 and 10). They have just missed the boat. So they release a codec in a year or two or five that's maybe a little better than MPEG-4 part 10... Ok so what? Nobody will really care. Net connections only get faster, harddrives get larger, so even if you offer 20% better compression it doesn't matter, people will stick with the standard.
Vorbis had more of a chance since it actually did get released around the time that there was interest in upgrading from MP3 to something better for some things. However they largely lost out (it does have some use, in game engines for example) in part because of their silly naming and in part because of their poor surround support. However Theora is too little too late as far as I can tell. The world is already settling in to their HD codecs and once the standards get entrenched, they'll stay there until there's a compelling reason to switch.
Timing is important. If your product isn't ready when it is needed, it isn't going to get used no matter how awesome it is in the end.
And following Thusnelda will be Snuppflog. They're just internal project names.
Intel chooses boring internal codenames like towns, we choose silly things that our incredulous detractors dare us to use. But only if we like them.
The benchmark that looks good in the lab.
YMMV.
The "objective" benchmark that has been "especially kind to Theora."
What the hell am I to make of that?
It's one clip -
apparently of a geek dead on his feet after pulling one too many all-nighters.
You can drown in techno-babble.
I want to see video.
Richly detailed backgrounds.
Textures. Wood and fur and cloth and grass. Subtle rendering of flesh tones.
Give me a real taste of how well your codec handles action. Take your camera outdoors. In the rain. Out on a boat. Take it on stage.
First off, most people don't care about lossless compression. It's a niche market. After all, even on extremely good sound gear, you are hard pressed to pick out 256k MP3 from uncompressed in blind tests. Also, popular though it might be, it wasn't popular enough for the big boys to pick up. Both Apple and Microsoft did their own lossless formats. Windows Media Audio has a lossless mode, and Apple uses ALAC. Now while Windows Media Player will happily play FLAC if you install a DirectShow codec (don't know about Quicktime), FLAC isn't included.
So popular in a small niche maybe, but not making any waves over all.
The PSNR graph is quite interesting. To get comparable PSNR values from a recent x264 for the given source, you will have to use ridiculously low settings. I got about 700fps, with the required (lowest) settings, which still give better PSNR at 250kbps (47.333db) and above (300kbps is 48.222db), than is marked on the graph. This is with the lowest possible x264 settings, one-pass ABR. Also note, how the PSNR graph for x264 looks like a perfect logarithmic curve. None of the other plots are as smooth. Now, if you were feeling paranoid, you might get the feeling that they didn't even test their source with x264 at all.
How is that any different than a company selling a physical product deeply discounted or below cost for an initial period of time in order to gain market share?
That practice is called 'dumping' and is illegal for most goods and services, at least in the United States.
To be fair, the whole thing is part of 'the Ogg Project'. Saying 'Theora is Ogg' is not actually incorrect, and it might get you laid at parties.
No need to be such a stickler, here have a beer.
You have to measure the PSNR of each codec with the same tool, silly (and avoid doing colorspace conversions which are lossy in the interchange. Keep the output in YCb'Cr' format). If you're using the x264 encoder's reported PSNR *cough*ahem* it's known to be wrong. It always reports way higher than other tools, like it's forgetting chroma is subsampled or its log-space algebra is just wrong or something.
Let me check myself with the clip linked in the article....mmmm lessee.... yep! that's what you're doing. So, BZZZT, no gold star, try again.
The results are real:
x264-0.0.0-0.20.20080905.fc10.x86_64 was used.
PSNR computed with dump_psnr (tool that ships with Theora), so that the same tool could be used with multiple formats. I compared the decompressed lossless yuv4mpeg files. You can easily reproduce these results: Grab http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/y4m/akiyo_qcif.y4m and the current Theora Thusnelda SVN, the above mentioned x264 and go to town. Encode with defaults. Constant QI in both cases. (CRF and other common wisdom x264 knobs hurt PSNR in this case, though because of the nature of the test I would have stuck with defaults regardless)
This test wasn't intended to be a critical bake-off between formats. Thats something for a third party to do anyways. I feel somewhat dirty for having a part in something being spun this way.
A big concern for Theora is performing well enough that no one feels the need to regret using a freely licensed format. Being as good/better than some particular encumbered encoder would be great, but really it is just important to be in the ballpark. The videophiles are going to use whatever feels sexiest today (read: best marketed) regardless of licensing, CPU consumption, or even real quality.
While completely real this testing was not *at all rigorous*, you can think of the x264 example as something provided to give the graph scale and not something you can use to say that Theora is superior, only that its not laughably worse. I think this does show that some of the claims that "theora sucks" are over-hyped.
I initially created these graphs because someone published a paper with highly flawed and unreasonable results showing Theora doing >30dB worse than x264. So a lot of the testing parameters came from trying to mimic his particular test rig so I could understand his mistake. -- It just so happens that the graph makes a nice statement about Theora's improvement over time, so Monty made use of it in his latest report to his employer on Theora's progress.
No one involved with Theora is saying that this test says that Theora is generally better. It's only "Look, you can stop fretting about quality-- we're basically in the right ballpark now. It's time to get other issues like adoption, software support, etc fixed while the final polish is being put on the new encoder".
--Greg Maxwell
I've also commented on this reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8iphn/theora_encoder_improvments_comparable_to_h264/
The host can use any codec they want and it is transparent to the client. By doing this, the client never notices, and they don't pay royalties.
The manufacturer of the playback device (if not a PC) pays royalties to Adobe for Flash Player and passes these on to the client.
It's more likely than you think.
What is "centipedes in my vagina"? Oh wait, this isn't Jeopardy!.
PSNR not only does "not measure perceived quality", it's also of next to zero worth in determining the effectiveness of a codec. For one, x264's psychovisual optimizations actually drop the PSNR and SSIM of the output compared to a non-psychovisually optimized encode. For an example of how meaningless PSNR is, look at
http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/x264vsElecard/
Of worth noting is that in these screenshots, Elecard has a higher PSNR than x264.
Talk to average users, and ask them "what is a flac file?", and "what is a wav file?", then ask them "which one would you use to record audio?". 99.999% would say "wav".
Actually, that percentage of your 'average users' would just *blink* with glazed over eyes...and not have a clue what you are talking about.
I say this after having worked tech support for Creative Labs, dealing with mp3 players and your 'average users.
Now I will agree that more 'average users' will recognise a *.wav file as a sound file compared to recognising a *.flac file as a sound file...if we leave 'lossless' and other qualifiers out of the equation.
But 99.999%????...'average users'???
Hah! I would not touch that statistic with a bleach-soaked 10 foot pole, because I know where you pulled it from, and it's drawing flies already, because it stinks so bad!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Yeaaah. First of all, let me just say that I'm not claiming Theora is better than H.264, or even on quite equal footing (as gmaxwell said, that isn't really even the point). So there, that's out of the way.
In any case, your suggestion to eyeball these comparisons that are just insanely old considering the improvements Theora has gone through is pretty clueless, more so with you even admitting to their datedness. (Sure, x264 has improved as well, but Theora has had the *cough* benefit of rather much more low-hanging fruit due to the not very high quality of the original encoder inherited from VP3.)
So I'm gonna ask _you_ to use your eyeballs and follow the link in this very article, 'cause there are before/after shots there of old and new Theora encoder output. Then come back saying that these ancient comparisons are representative of the performance of the current code. That is, after all, what this article is about.
No one person can be objective, a fair value can only be reached when their is competition.
Patents and copyrights are government granted monopolies, therefore anti-competition, and thus will always be unfairly priced.
Yes, I was being sarcastic. I was actually showing that free solutions CAN catch on and dominate.
Image quality vs bitrate means very little without mentioning CPU/memory usage. H.264's greatest weakness is the heavy CPU load on playback, it's just not friendly to low-cost and/or mobile devices. If Theora can get within the ballpark in terms of quality, but beat H.264 in speed, that could be the edge it needs to hit the mainstream.
Right now it's little more than an academic experiment. Floating point everything can give you fantastic quality, but it will crawl so slowly that people will choose a lesser-quality alternative that runs faster.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I looked at his links, and what I see backs him up. This optimization of the x264 codec is optimized for SSIM (Structural SIMilarity, a measurement of image comparison accuracy), which inherently decreases PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio). After all, an accurate, less densely compressed image will actually show textures and such better! I personally like to be able to pause a video I'm watching, and look at say... the whiskers on Hugh Jackman's face (I'm sure you guys might like the equivalent). While PSNR is important for determining compressibility, in lossy compression, you're talking about losing details no matter what. Some people want those smaller file sizes! Comparing apples with oranges is more of a taste comparison than an aesthetics debate, but it's still important to be informed about the real differences.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
"Ogg" is actually a term from an early internet game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogging
Theora is named after Theora Jones, a secondary heroine character from the movie 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future' about a dystopian future where video media is overwhelming, centralized, oppressive, dangerous, and an off switch on a television is illegal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora_Jones#Theora_Jones
"Xiph" is actually from the Greek ξÎÏÎÏ (sword) by way of 'Xiphophorus' (sword-bearing, pseudolatin?) from the genus name of a fish (Xiphophorus helleri). Which is where I picked it up in middle school. I'd been using it for my software projects since I was 14 or so and by the time Xiph.Org was a real thing [many many years later] I wanted to change the name to something less silly and my co-founders voted me down. They liked Xiph. It became the precedent-setting silly name.
Vorbis is from Terry Pratchett's _Small Gods_ and I dearly hope Mr. Pratchett considers it a compliment. It was meant as tribute to my favorite fictional villain, Archdeacon Vorbis. "A mind like a steel marble"
It's free, from the BBC. It's never blocky because it uses wavelets.
"You believe your opinion of what the product is worth is more important than what THEY think it is worth."
That's how capitalism works, Toonol. What you think your product is worth doesn't matter, only what people will be willing to pay for it. It can come out in your favour (like that IPhone app that did nothing), or to your loss (the vast majority of would-be artists).
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Turns out there was an error in the methadology used in the original comparison, which hit x264 for more than 4 dB of difference.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8iphn/theora_encoder_improvments_comparable_to_h264/c09eyvc
Edit: HAHAHA! We figured out what was wrong--thanks a ton, gmaxwell, for coming on IRC and resolving this! Turns out his testing methodology was flawed... but not in the way I thought!
Turns he out he did everything correctly... but he used ffmpeg for outputting the raw y4m file to have its quality measured by dump_psnr (but not for theora). Apparently, ffmpeg flags the output chroma as "420mpeg2" instead of "420", which results in over 4db of PSNR being slashed off of x264's results unfairly.
Oops. We already have a patch submitted to ffmpeg for the problem and a retraction of the Theora comparison results is in the works. Thanks to gmaxwell for taking the initiative and David Conrad (Yuvi) for finding the bug!
The Doom9 thread on the same topic:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146893
Anyway, given H.264 is a more recent codec that is highly optimized for PSNR and has had many years of refinement in a number of implementations, it's hard to conceive of how Theora could even approach it in compression efficiency, let alone beat it.
My video compression blog
Schmoopy Ahead of ED-209 In Objective WKRP Quality
Posted by tomzyk on Thu May 08, '09 10:41 AM
from the whats-the-whozits-huh dept.
[ Media ] [ Technology ] somebody writes
"Bliggerblah hackers have been hard at work improving the Schmoopy codec over the past year, with the latest versions gaining on and passing ED-209 in objective WKRP quality measurements. From the update: 'Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Quasimodo pulling ahead of ED-209 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that WKRP is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Schmoopy. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.' Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impending launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top-4 web site. It's looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the ED-209 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of ED-209 in 2010."
yeah. so um... this article has something to do with "video codecs". gotcha. And I only got that after reading the article multiple times and bolding some of those keywords in there.
Shouldn't an "article summary" at least summarize what the hell it's talking about? Even a simple "[an open video codec]" inserted right after the initial mention of "Theora" would have done wonders to the layman's comprehension of it, thus preventing my head from asploding in trying to understand this gibberish. Maybe we could even add in some more useful links to the summary to make it easier on us folks that aren't in-the-know? (H.264 Theora PSNR etc...)
Or is this too much to ask?
(Yes, I know... "Welcome to Slashdot!" and "You must be new here.")
Karma: NaN
You certainly can't link against it without being GPL/MIT yourself but I doubt that stops you using calling a program that does the encoding of a file with x264. As an example LAME is GPL and gets used all over the place. The ffmpeg stuff is also quite popular.
I guess "popular" would need to be defined. Are we counting programs or are we counting videos produced with a particular encoder? I'd guess that whatever Adobe ships would be the most popular for the later and some open source thing if you were counting the former...
First, the GP said "only a victim would pay what a capitalist says their work is worth", not what they think it's worth. The GP singled out "capitalists", whatever he or she meant by that--certainly not the formal definition, which is basically those who create, own, or utilize capital goods--but it really applies to negotiation with anyone. Even if you assume the other party is acting altruistically, which is never a safe thing to do, they can't possibly know what the product will be worth to you, relative to the available alternatives, which is what matters when deciding whether to make a purchase.
Second, it is frankly ridiculous to claim, as you have, that simply choosing not to purchase a product victimizes those who would attempt to sell it to you. There are two factors which fully determine whether a given trade will take place: the price below which it makes no sense for the seller to agree to the trade (because they would be taking a loss, or others are offering more for the same good), and the price above which the trade makes no sense for the buyer (because the cost would outweigh the benefit, or others are offering the same good for less). If the former is above the latter then no trade will occur, and buyer and seller go their separate ways no better or worse off than they were before. Otherwise, an effective price will be set somewhere between the seller's asking price and the buyer's offer, and both benefit from the exchange (ex ante). Either way there is no victim; no one loses.
The sibling comment by "bug1" isn't quite correct; a fair price can be reached in any case where two or more parties agree to trade voluntarily. Competition tends to drive prices down, but the price remains fair--not less than the seller's costs, or more than what the buyer believes the product to be worth--even in its absence. The problem with force-backed monopolies lies in the way they prevent voluntary trade from taking place. Those who rely on copyrights and patents for their income are not wrong for setting "unfair prices"; on the contrary, they are accomplices and beneficiaries of the government-sponsored aggression with which said monopolies are enforced, which is a far more serious charge.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat