<story><title>An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/07/11/royalty-free-web-video-codecs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akersten</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s incredible that the MPEG-LA mafia has gotten away with &lt;i&gt;23 patents&lt;/i&gt; on a system of mathematical operations. Math is explicitly outlined as non-patentable. While this extends to all software patents, I&amp;#x27;m astounded that even this very narrow case hasn&amp;#x27;t been challenged on its face. We can&amp;#x27;t move to unencumbered codecs quickly enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kmeisthax</author><text>Strictly speaking, pretty much any patentable invention is going to &lt;i&gt;use&lt;/i&gt; maths. Video codec related patents aren&amp;#x27;t just &amp;quot;I patent the discrete fourier transform&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;here&amp;#x27;s how you can use frequency domain transforms, texture lookups, entropy coding, and other things in order to build a low-bitrate video codec&amp;quot;. There&amp;#x27;s detailed explanations of what the invention does and what is legally being claimed, which will usually be a quite-small improvement on an existing technology.&lt;p&gt;Many of the standards-essential ITU&amp;#x2F;MPEG patents have active litigation surrounding them, and the defendents would have been daft to not try to challenge video codec patents on exactly the sort of basis. The fact that the patents still stand would indicate that they are more than just maths.</text></comment>
<story><title>An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/07/11/royalty-free-web-video-codecs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akersten</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s incredible that the MPEG-LA mafia has gotten away with &lt;i&gt;23 patents&lt;/i&gt; on a system of mathematical operations. Math is explicitly outlined as non-patentable. While this extends to all software patents, I&amp;#x27;m astounded that even this very narrow case hasn&amp;#x27;t been challenged on its face. We can&amp;#x27;t move to unencumbered codecs quickly enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vulcan01</author><text>My understanding (IANAL) is that although maths are not patentable, the use of maths is – much as science is not patentable, but the use of science (technology) is.</text></comment>