First of all, in the US, decoding MPEG-1 is not yet patent free, since some of the MPEG-1 layer 3 audio (MP3) patents are still around. I suppose you might be able to challenge them based on prior art.
I did propose that a MPEG-1 subset without MP3 could be used for the common base format for HTML5 but it basically did not go anywhere because 1. If a subset is used, then enough people will probably start using a full version of MPEG-1 (with MP3 audio) that free and legal software cannot support, and 2. Ogg Theora and Vorbis have better quality. http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019991.html
I figure MPEG-1 support is useful once full MPEG-1 can be supported (Dec 2012 maybe?) if there still is no base format (or at least no base format better than Motion JPEG).
I generally agree with what you are saying, (See my original email on the 2028 year), but 2003 is not the date that matters, since H.264 continues to add substantial amendments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Versions
Well, you could read the fine post, and notice that it says 2028. Or you could download the python program that I wrote and use it to find expiration dates on any list of US patents that you want: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jrincayc/Patent_utils
Chrome is not open source. Chromium is open source and does not support H.264. As I understand it, anywhere that H.264 is patented cannot have a legal and cost less open source implementation of H.264.
Depends on whether they want a showdown with maybe Mozilla and definitely the Free Software community. Right now Google can probably claim that it is beta that they are only supporting H.264. However, if they persist in only supporting H.264 for youtube, they are basically saying that they do not want open source programs to be able to view youtube anywhere that H.264 is patented (which is more than just the US). Using a rate of $0.66/GB per year (Amazon S3 rate) the $5 million dollar MPEG-LA fee would buy about 7.2 petabytes of online storage ( 5e6/(0.055*12)/1024/1024 ) . So they can probably transcode and make it available online for something on the same order magnitude as the cost of the MPEG-LA licensing fee. I think it is fairly likely that Google will start supporting Ogg Theora/Vorbis as well.
HTML5 allows multiple video or audio codecs to be provided. Therefore, Youtube and Vimeo can provide both H.264 and Ogg Theora/Vorbis support. If their concern is bandwidth, then they can just provide a slightly lower quality Ogg version with the same bandwidth usage.
I have read many of the posts in this discussion, and I thought I would weigh in.
First of all, as I went through creating the list of expiring copyrights, I noticed that as I got farther back in time the copyrights that expired were less interesting to me. For example the 28 year old ones are closing in on being able to legally start emulating most games of the older consoles. By the time we get into 1934, I had trouble finding ones that I cared about.
For the questions as to why shouldn't we just write new stories and software etc? I do agree with that up to a point, and I have certainly written quite a few things that public domain or permissively licensed. But, first of all, the economically efficient price for information is its marginal cost, or zero. Second of all, if you care about stories and software being created, it is often easier to start from an existing work, and make improvements. For example, "What Child is This" uses the tune of Greensleeves. Or Shakespeare using existing plays, but improving them. Human time is precious, and if you can use less by 'stealing' that helps society. Why reinvent the wheel? In short, economically, copyright should last long enough to compensate the creator, and then it should be freed. (I have written about this before, but I know more now than I knew then: http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/1/8/122920/9442 )
As for the people who think that no body follows copyright anymore, so why do we care? There is some truth to that, but things that are legal are much easier to do. For example, it is legal to download freeciv, but not starcraft. I'll let you guess which is easier to do.
Now, on to kdawson's question about the odds that Congress lets 1923 works expire in 2018. I think there is a fair chance that the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension in 1998 was the last major copyright extension that occurs in the US. Why? Because more and more people are realizing that the public domain matters and is useful. In 1976, people stated with a straight face that if it wasn't available commercially, it wasn't available. So in 1976 it could be argued that keeping it in copyright kept it available to the public. In 1998, there was protest by a few people such as Michael Hart, founder of the Project Gutenberg. In 2009 places like Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and Google Books prove that public domain content is more accessible. Plus you have people like the pirate party calling for 5 year copyright ( http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english ). So I think there will be a serious fight to stop any further copyright extension. I wrote this slashdot story to try and get the message out that copyright is not what it used to be.
I can see some justification for software patents. However, what I have never seen is why they should last as long as patents on say, drugs. To make a new device or chemical can require years of testing in the laboratory. With software, I typically design, write and test each idea in the space of a week or a few months. As well, if the patent lasts significantly longer than it would take a second inventor to discover the idea and publish it, then the patent is becoming harmful to society rather than helpful. In short, because it is easier to invent software than physical inventions and because most software patents would be discovered soon anyway, I believe that software patents should be much shorter in term than physical patents. I want to know why someone thinks that a computer invention from 1990 should still have a monopoly. If there is a case for software patents, it would be for a much shorter term, like maybe 3 years.
If you really think that there will be a severe shortage of uranium in 2013, you need to get into the uranium futures market. Oct 2014 futures for Uranium are going for 47.50 right now. http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/base/uranium.html
I let my two year old try both my desktop computer and my olpc. Neither is really suitable to be used without an adult being in the room. With the OLPC XO-1, I was worried that he might be able to break off the antennas or break the screen/keyboard connector. What actually got first broke was one of the keys got torn off, but I glued it back on. Sugar does have some good activities that he had fun with, specifically the Record activity and TamTam mini (a sound making program). With my desktop computer he liked watching the worms screensaver, and making it make beeps. If I was choosing what to do right now for a two year old, I would probably put Sugar on an old desktop computer. On the other hand, I would not bother doing so unless the kid shows serious interest in computers. If the kid is coming up to you and trying to play with your computers, this will make them happy, otherwise it is not worth the bother. For what it's worth, he had far more fun with a old dsl modem, a old caller id, a ethernet hub and a couple ethernet cables and telephone cables than he has had with the computers so far. So on the dollars per amount of fun, real computers for two year olds are not very good. Also expect stuff to be broken, and some adult will have to be in the room watching or playing along. A regular laptop or netbook would probably be broken within hours by a two year old.
MPEG-1 with layer 2 audio is probably pretty patent free, since the near complete draft standard was publicly available as ISO CD 11172 by December 6, 1991. I haven't found anyone claiming that they have patents on it, on the other hand I haven't found anyone claiming that there are no patents on it. My long summary of my search for the MPEG-1 patents is up on kuro5hin.
I live in Idaho and I already have to pay sale tax on any Internet purchase. The way this works is I keep track of my internet purchases, and then at the end of the year I add the up the amount and add 6% of the amount of total purchases to my Idaho 'income' tax. It's a pain and usually takes more time than the rest of my income tax (especially when Idaho does something annoying like change the amount of sales tax in the middle of the year). http://tax.idaho.gov/answers_Sales_tax.htm#11
I live in Idaho and I already have to pay sale tax on any Amazon purchases. The way this works is I keep track of my internet purchases, and then at the end of the year I add the up the amount and add 6% of the amount of total purchases to my Idaho 'income' tax. It's a pain and usually takes more time than the rest of my income tax (especially when Idaho does something annoying like change the amount of sales tax in the middle of the year). http://tax.idaho.gov/answers_Sales_tax.htm#11
I don't see the contradiction. I once listened to a person explain to me for an hour why he believed that the Christian bible was teaching that we can be reincarnated. I think he had to be a bit selective about the passages and the interpretation, but I don't think he was completely wrong.
But essentially you are increasing the insulation between different regions. If you imagine a tube filled with air, and you heat one end, you will get some air flow between the two. If it is not insulated and you have a constant amount of heat, it will eventually reach a steady state with some temperature difference between the two ends. Now if you block some of the air you will be able to increase the steady state temperature difference between the two. Any idea on how to calculate what removing the wind energy will do to the temperature differences on Earth?
What proof could the company possibly provide that they actually want to get me to orbit? The only way for the company to make money is to kill me.
As well, most life insurance policies have various hazardous activities clauses (for example, if you die while sky diving tough.). This scheme would not last long.
Traditional encyclopedia provide the proverbial "paper trail" by virtue of material durability, and (hypothetically) are further protected by the academic integrity of the scholars who maintain them. I can't help feeling that Wikipedia is more succeptable to the tyranny of the masses and the whims of political fashion. While wikipedia does permit the dedicated user to track all modifications, this ability is seldom employed by the casual user.
Certainly the naive user is at a disadvantage here, but that is a problem in more places than just Wikipedia (ever heard of the weekly world news?). For the serious researcher, there is far more information than in a mere static article. For example, here is the article on George W. Bush on January 2002.
As for durability, you can download the entire database if you so choose (and you have a fast internet connection).
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, in the US, decoding MPEG-1 is not yet patent free, since some of the MPEG-1 layer 3 audio (MP3) patents are still around. I suppose you might be able to challenge them based on prior art.
I did propose that a MPEG-1 subset without MP3 could be used for the common base format for HTML5 but it basically did not go anywhere because 1. If a subset is used, then enough people will probably start using a full version of MPEG-1 (with MP3 audio) that free and legal software cannot support, and 2. Ogg Theora and Vorbis have better quality.
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019991.html
I figure MPEG-1 support is useful once full MPEG-1 can be supported (Dec 2012 maybe?) if there still is no base format (or at least no base format better than Motion JPEG).
I generally agree with what you are saying, (See my original email on the 2028 year), but 2003 is not the date that matters, since H.264 continues to add substantial amendments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Versions
Well, you could read the fine post, and notice that it says 2028. Or you could download the python program that I wrote and use it to find expiration dates on any list of US patents that you want:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jrincayc/Patent_utils
Is this the comment you ment?
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1519324&cid=30847608
Chrome is not open source. Chromium is open source and does not support H.264. As I understand it, anywhere that H.264 is patented cannot have a legal and cost less open source implementation of H.264.
Depends on whether they want a showdown with maybe Mozilla and definitely the Free Software community. Right now Google can probably claim that it is beta that they are only supporting H.264. However, if they persist in only supporting H.264 for youtube, they are basically saying that they do not want open source programs to be able to view youtube anywhere that H.264 is patented (which is more than just the US). Using a rate of $0.66/GB per year (Amazon S3 rate) the $5 million dollar MPEG-LA fee would buy about 7.2 petabytes of online storage ( 5e6/(0.055*12)/1024/1024 ) . So they can probably transcode and make it available online for something on the same order magnitude as the cost of the MPEG-LA licensing fee. I think it is fairly likely that Google will start supporting Ogg Theora/Vorbis as well.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-videos-on-youtube/
MP3 should be going patent free somewhere between Dec 2012 or 2017. I have written more at:
http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_status/Kuro5hin_MPEG_patent_status_paper
In the US the last MPEG-LA patents listed for H.264 expire in 2028, not 2017.
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-July/020737.html
Its worse. You would have to wait until 2028 for the US MPEG-LA H.264 patents to expire.
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-July/020737.html
HTML5 allows multiple video or audio codecs to be provided. Therefore, Youtube and Vimeo can provide both H.264 and Ogg Theora/Vorbis support. If their concern is bandwidth, then they can just provide a slightly lower quality Ogg version with the same bandwidth usage.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#the-source-element
IDA Pro which is a interactive disassembler has no FLOSS equivalent. objdump -xd just isn't the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Disassembler
The Pirate Party wants a term of 5 years. I would be quite happy with 23 years.
I have read many of the posts in this discussion, and I thought I would weigh in.
First of all, as I went through creating the list of expiring copyrights, I noticed that as I got farther back in time the copyrights that expired were less interesting to me. For example the 28 year old ones are closing in on being able to legally start emulating most games of the older consoles. By the time we get into 1934, I had trouble finding ones that I cared about.
For the questions as to why shouldn't we just write new stories and software etc? I do agree with that up to a point, and I have certainly written quite a few things that public domain or permissively licensed. But, first of all, the economically efficient price for information is its marginal cost, or zero. Second of all, if you care about stories and software being created, it is often easier to start from an existing work, and make improvements. For example, "What Child is This" uses the tune of Greensleeves. Or Shakespeare using existing plays, but improving them. Human time is precious, and if you can use less by 'stealing' that helps society. Why reinvent the wheel? In short, economically, copyright should last long enough to compensate the creator, and then it should be freed. (I have written about this before, but I know more now than I knew then: http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/1/8/122920/9442 )
As for the people who think that no body follows copyright anymore, so why do we care? There is some truth to that, but things that are legal are much easier to do. For example, it is legal to download freeciv, but not starcraft. I'll let you guess which is easier to do.
Now, on to kdawson's question about the odds that Congress lets 1923 works expire in 2018. I think there is a fair chance that the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension in 1998 was the last major copyright extension that occurs in the US. Why? Because more and more people are realizing that the public domain matters and is useful. In 1976, people stated with a straight face that if it wasn't available commercially, it wasn't available. So in 1976 it could be argued that keeping it in copyright kept it available to the public. In 1998, there was protest by a few people such as Michael Hart, founder of the Project Gutenberg. In 2009 places like Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and Google Books prove that public domain content is more accessible. Plus you have people like the pirate party calling for 5 year copyright ( http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english ). So I think there will be a serious fight to stop any further copyright extension. I wrote this slashdot story to try and get the message out that copyright is not what it used to be.
If I read it right, it is 14 years plus it can be renewed for 14 more years, so 28 years.
http://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf
I can see some justification for software patents. However, what I have never seen is why they should last as long as patents on say, drugs. To make a new device or chemical can require years of testing in the laboratory. With software, I typically design, write and test each idea in the space of a week or a few months. As well, if the patent lasts significantly longer than it would take a second inventor to discover the idea and publish it, then the patent is becoming harmful to society rather than helpful. In short, because it is easier to invent software than physical inventions and because most software patents would be discovered soon anyway, I believe that software patents should be much shorter in term than physical patents. I want to know why someone thinks that a computer invention from 1990 should still have a monopoly. If there is a case for software patents, it would be for a much shorter term, like maybe 3 years.
If you really think that there will be a severe shortage of uranium in 2013, you need to get into the uranium futures market. Oct 2014 futures for Uranium are going for 47.50 right now. http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/base/uranium.html
I let my two year old try both my desktop computer and my olpc. Neither is really suitable to be used without an adult being in the room. With the OLPC XO-1, I was worried that he might be able to break off the antennas or break the screen/keyboard connector. What actually got first broke was one of the keys got torn off, but I glued it back on. Sugar does have some good activities that he had fun with, specifically the Record activity and TamTam mini (a sound making program). With my desktop computer he liked watching the worms screensaver, and making it make beeps. If I was choosing what to do right now for a two year old, I would probably put Sugar on an old desktop computer. On the other hand, I would not bother doing so unless the kid shows serious interest in computers. If the kid is coming up to you and trying to play with your computers, this will make them happy, otherwise it is not worth the bother. For what it's worth, he had far more fun with a old dsl modem, a old caller id, a ethernet hub and a couple ethernet cables and telephone cables than he has had with the computers so far. So on the dollars per amount of fun, real computers for two year olds are not very good. Also expect stuff to be broken, and some adult will have to be in the room watching or playing along. A regular laptop or netbook would probably be broken within hours by a two year old.
MPEG-1 with layer 2 audio is probably pretty patent free, since the near complete draft standard was publicly available as ISO CD 11172 by December 6, 1991. I haven't found anyone claiming that they have patents on it, on the other hand I haven't found anyone claiming that there are no patents on it. My long summary of my search for the MPEG-1 patents is up on kuro5hin.
I live in Idaho and I already have to pay sale tax on any Internet purchase. The way this works is I keep track of my internet purchases, and then at the end of the year I add the up the amount and add 6% of the amount of total purchases to my Idaho 'income' tax. It's a pain and usually takes more time than the rest of my income tax (especially when Idaho does something annoying like change the amount of sales tax in the middle of the year). http://tax.idaho.gov/answers_Sales_tax.htm#11
I live in Idaho and I already have to pay sale tax on any Amazon purchases. The way this works is I keep track of my internet purchases, and then at the end of the year I add the up the amount and add 6% of the amount of total purchases to my Idaho 'income' tax. It's a pain and usually takes more time than the rest of my income tax (especially when Idaho does something annoying like change the amount of sales tax in the middle of the year). http://tax.idaho.gov/answers_Sales_tax.htm#11
Here are some links:
http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1414
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/thread.html#459
The general reason given for ending G1G1 was that it was a strain on the OLPC volunteers. See especially Nicole Lee's post http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/000474.html
I don't see the contradiction. I once listened to a person explain to me for an hour why he believed that the Christian bible was teaching that we can be reincarnated. I think he had to be a bit selective about the passages and the interpretation, but I don't think he was completely wrong.
But essentially you are increasing the insulation between different regions. If you imagine a tube filled with air, and you heat one end, you will get some air flow between the two. If it is not insulated and you have a constant amount of heat, it will eventually reach a steady state with some temperature difference between the two ends. Now if you block some of the air you will be able to increase the steady state temperature difference between the two. Any idea on how to calculate what removing the wind energy will do to the temperature differences on Earth?
What proof could the company possibly provide that they actually want to get me to orbit? The only way for the company to make money is to kill me.
As well, most life insurance policies have various hazardous activities clauses (for example, if you die while sky diving tough.). This scheme would not last long.
Traditional encyclopedia provide the proverbial "paper trail" by virtue of material durability, and (hypothetically) are further protected by the academic integrity of the scholars who maintain them. I can't help feeling that Wikipedia is more succeptable to the tyranny of the masses and the whims of political fashion. While wikipedia does permit the dedicated user to track all modifications, this ability is seldom employed by the casual user.
Certainly the naive user is at a disadvantage here, but that is a problem in more places than just Wikipedia (ever heard of the weekly world news?). For the serious researcher, there is far more information than in a mere static article. For example, here is the article on George W. Bush on January 2002.
As for durability, you can download the entire database if you so choose (and you have a fast internet connection).