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MPEG LA Announces Call For DASH Patents
An anonymous reader writes: The MPEG LA has announced a call for patents essential to the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (or DASH) standard. According to the MPEG LA's press release, "Market adoption of DASH technology standards has increased to the point where the market would benefit from the availability of a convenient nondiscriminatory, nonexclusive worldwide one-stop patent pool license." The newly formed MPEG-DASH patent pool's licensing program will allegedly offer the market "efficient access to this important technology."
No, what we need is an abolishment on Software Patents, so that armed thugs like the MPEGLA can't extort licensing fees from a developer because the code they wrote on their own happens to do something that is abstractly claimed in some random poor quality patent.
I can't see the "world" seeing any benefit from this, MPEG LA on the other hand...
Ah well. Everyone already knows how this is going to pan out, the community will come up with a solution not encumbered by patents and gravitate toward that instead, MPEG LA will continue to remain irrelevant.
This patenting places a burden on such access, the exact opposite of their declared purpose.
Pure, unadulterated, greedy bastards.
Dash is an XML format containing the URL's to media files and additional metadata (bitrates etc). Is there something novel or none-obvious about the way it works that a 12 year old couldn't figure out?
Which roughly translates into "Wouldn't it be awesome if all you bitches had to keep paying us money?".
So many software patents are bloody terrible. They're stuff we all learned about in school, applied to a specific thing, and then made so generic as to claim ownership of pretty an entire class of computing.
This entity needs to stop existing, as they're really nothing but parasites pretending they invented anything.
Assholes.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The patent lawyers mad that impossible a long time ago. Given something you want to do, it is nearly impossible to search for a patent that does it in less time than it takes to implement it from scratch. Beyond that, if you actually do search patents you open yourself up to treble damages to every idiot with an obvious patent out there wanting to claim the rights to something that took you all of 30 seconds to think of and another 5 minutes to write the code. The current advice is to NEVER read patents.
Beyond that, even if you find a patent that does exactly what you want and saves you months of development, nothing at all prevents the patent holder from demanding more than you expect your project to bring in for the first 5 years. And then, even if you implement something else you will have painted a big target on your back that practically guarantees that you will be eaten alive by court costs before you can even make a dime on your own work.
So no. Until the USPTO and other offices rais the bar for patents a LOT, AND court costs are cut by a factor of a thousand or so, they will remain nothing but an impediment to progress.
This call for patents comes just after HEVC Advance announce a HEVC patent pool to compete with MPEG LA. DASH is a complimentary technology to HEVC (h.265), and MPEG LA know it. By offering both DASH and HEVC patent licensing portfolios, they probably believe they are making themselves more attractive to deal with than HEVC Advance.
Nevermind that this patent licensing competition is actually likely to impede the uptake of both technologies.
Here is the original MPEG-LA press release. They really did entitle it "call for patents", which is obnoxious because it plays off of "call for papers", which is a call to share technology information, not restrict it. This type of turning a phrase to be the opposite and evil intention of its original reminds me of Braveheart's jus primae noctis.