Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just received a patent that grants the company the rights to GPU-accelerated video encoding, which may be the primary technology that takes advantage of the horsepower of the GPU in today's consumer applications. The broad patent covers tasks to perform motion estimation in videos, the use of the depth buffer of the GPU, to determine comprising, collocating video frames, mapping pixels to texels, frame processing using the GPU, and output of data to the CPU."
A Graphics Processing Unit has been used to accelerate video!
If this doesn't qualify as 'obvious' then we are all doomed.
Are they serious? This is virtually the same thing as someone inventing a car and me winning the patent on "driving cars."
Oh look, another patent that shouldn't have been granted. The only thing the modern patent system is good for is buying new boats for patent lawyers. Does this still surprise anyone?
This patent mightn't change much, but it's the weight of the hundreds of patents that's spoiling the AV field.
Microsoft is a member of MPEG-LA, but they pay more royalties than they make from the organisation, so they're probably eager to make their own AV thicket.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Microsoft
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Audio-video_patents
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This will make it almost impossible for smaller companies to make fast video encoding applications. They will have to start paying royalties if they want to encode video using the GPU in applications such as FRAPS or any video converter. Their products will either have to become more expensive or remain inferior to products made by larger companies.
All I have to say is... a GPU is like a CPU. We're gonna get patents for everything twice now, just like with handheld devices?
All I have to say is... a GPU is like a CPU. We're gonna get patents for everything twice now, just like with handheld devices?
Just wait until they start putting GPU's in handheld devices and we're going to see a *hat trick for each patent.
* I would have used 'three-peat' or '3-peat' instead of 'hat trick' but I believe those are trademarked.
This patent is nothing more than a description on how to use a general purpose processor to perform specific tasks. Adding to that, it describes a way to use computers to handle video. And using GPUs to do work is fundamentally very old technology, as they basically are glorified vector processors. So, how can such an obvious and overreaching patent pass regarding such fundamental technology? Is this not a obvious application of this particular technology?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
What is confusing? Microsoft does something. Microsoft applies for a patent on that thing. A patent lawyer who knows very little about the tech in question, has about 600 applications he's currently supposed to be processing, has been instructed that he can't work overtime this week by his boss, but also that he is too far behind on his portfolio and needs to catch up, and who doesn't make near as much as his buddies from law school do to begin with, looks at it. He thinks "I don't even know what half of these words *mean*", then notices that Microsoft filed the patent. Through his haze of pain and frustration he dimly remembers that Microsoft is an "Innovative and economy driving company" and says "fuck it." He hits the "Approve" button.
His boss is happy because his numbers are better this week, and there is no real penalty for approving patents that later get overturned. Even assuming that Microsoft ever attempts to defend the patent rather than just threatening small companies with it in hopes that they'll cave without a court battle.
The things currently wrong with the patent system which this story demonstrates:
1) Patent attorneys often don't understand the tech they are expected to review. This is less of a problem with "real" patents, since the device being patented is just that. A device. If it does what it says it does, in the way it says it does, understanding why isn't all that important. Software is essentially algorithms. If you don't understand them, then judging their uniqueness is difficult.
2) The reviewers in the patent office are phenomenally overworked right now. There are literally tens of thousands of applications backed up. I saw some patent official guy at the end of the Bush administration say that if all applications stopped, right then, he could maybe catch up in a year or two. I don't imagine it's gotten better. Both Bush and Obama have authorized more reviewers, but it seems to be like filling the ocean with a teaspoon.
3) Patent reviewers make a fraction of what patent attorneys in private practice make. This means that they're always looking to get out and get into private firms. Probably not all of them, but like any rational human, most want to make more money and get more respect.
4) There is no real penalty for screwing up. Most patents never get defended in court, because the companies that own them mainly used them as bargaining chips, or to threaten smaller, defenseless, companies. Even if the patent does go to court, it'll take years to invalidate, and no repercussions fall on the approver.
Eliminating software patents would, in one stroke, alleviate or eliminate two of these four problems. Probably the most serious two. It'd be awful nice if it happened. The alternative is probably the whole system collapsing under its own weight eventually.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The annoying thing is that there won't be a lot of actual prior art to fight the patent. GPU's at that point weren't very good at general purpose computations, so there wasn't a lot of generally available software that did it. Less so for video encoding specifically. OTOH, a GeForce 3 was somewhat programmable and it was released in 2001. People were abusing even simpler GPU's for general purpose computation over ten years ago using texture combiners and compositing modes. Even before then, people used quite general purpose processors as GPU's, and probably could have executed video encoding code on them.
Sadly, despite the fact that if you were to travel back in time to 2003 and shout, "video encoding on the GPU will be practical in a few years," nobody would really be shocked; it is still patentable in our current system because nobody specifically published doing this exact process on this exact type of chip. I expect It'll basically be another land rush of "X on the Internet" and "(The exact same) X on the wireless" type patents on the GPU.
Though, apparently their use of the depth buffer is kind of an interesting hack. That's less obvious from my glance at it, but in what I'd think of as an ideal world, it wouldn't be patentable. It probably doesn't really apply on modern hardware with arbitrary memory buffers and programming in OpenCL. But, it'll still be close enough in behavior to something more sensible on modern hardware that it'll still be scary as part of a giant stack of patents being carried by a scary lawyer looking for rent on your work.
I bet the Roman Empire had a massive amount of patent backlogs too, right before the fall.
Someone invents the knife and Microsoft patents cutting meat with it. Society is not well served by patents like this.
Running code on a coprocessor is not novel in any way. It's what graphics coprocessors are for. This is like patenting a lemonade stand because it is located on the corner rather than in the middle of the block.
-- $G
One of the strongest justifications for patent protection is when you create something that becomes ridiculously obvious once you create it.
This idiotic meme needs to die. People are perfectly capable of assessing whether an idea is obvious or not after the fact. Having more information available doesn't mystically make people stupid.
This meme is mainly just a rationalization by those who prefer to replace thinking with soundbites.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.