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Can We Legislate Past the H.264 Debate?
Midnight Warrior writes "We could solve the H.264 debate if a country's legislature were to mandate that any patents that contribute to an industry-recognized standard were unenforceable in the application of that standard. Ideally, each standard would also be required to have a 'reference design' that could be used without further licensing. This could also solve problems with a ton of other deeply entrenched areas like hard drives, DRAM, etc. RAND tries to solve this strictly within industry, but both the presence of submarine patents and the low bar required to obtain a patent have made an obvious mess. Individual companies also use patent portfolios to set up mutually assured destruction. I'm not convinced that industry can solve this mess that government created. But I'm not stupid; this clearly has a broad ripple effect. Are there non-computer industries where this would be fatal? What if the patents were unenforceable only if the standard had a trademark and the implementer was compliant at the time of 'infringement'? Then, the patents could still be indirectly licensed, but it would force strict adherence to standards and would require the patent holders to fund the trademark group to defend it to the end. In the US model, of course."
How about socialists prove socialism is better ... seems simple enough.
H264 is far away from the theoretically best compression. So we just need one socialist to prove that they can do more, to make something that beats H264, and give it away for free.
The only way this could be impossible is if we all accept that socialism is inferior, or that it at least can never be as efficient as capitalism. You know, theora actually got somewhat close, and failed (or so it seems). Any other course of action, like the proposed legislation seems like an open insult. "Let's just steal it, since we can't hope to ever approach anything of that quality".