<story><title>Lenovo seeks to render Nokia&apos;s H.264 patents unenforceable</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/lenovo_seeks_to_render_nokias/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dzdt</author><text>The public interest is that interoperability standards should not require patented technology &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt; to implement.  The point of an interoperability standard is to allow a broad ecosystem with many producers and many consumers.  Here many producers of videos, many producers of video-processing and video-displaying technology, many consumers of these videos and associated technology.  The public interest is that the ecosystem should be vibrant, with easy access to new participants and low barriers to entry.&lt;p&gt;So, in the public interest, go Lenovo!  Especially considering the slime-ball tactics that Nokia apparently used here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>These standards aren’t just “plug C is 0.25 inches wide.” They are intimately tied to the compression technology itself. Developing new standards involves developing new compression technology, building and testing reference implementations, iterating, etc. All that costs money to develop. &lt;i&gt;That will get paid for one way or the other.&lt;/i&gt; What way that happens affects the public interest analysis.&lt;p&gt;Look what happened with web standards. Developing and testing new web standards requires building reference implementations in browsers. Browsers are expensive to develop, so the standards are controlled by a handful of companies like Google and Apple. But the standards are free to implement. Is that better for the public? Maybe, but the public interest analysis is more complex than “free to implement.”&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as “free.” R&amp;amp;D will be monetized somehow—the question is how. Different monetization approaches have different and non-obvious impacts on the public interest. Consider for example the shift away from paying for software to giving it away “free.” You used to pay Symbian $5-10 bucks per phone for an OS. Android you can get for free. But Symbian didn’t build an advertising platform into the core of each phone. Monetization matters.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lenovo seeks to render Nokia&apos;s H.264 patents unenforceable</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/lenovo_seeks_to_render_nokias/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dzdt</author><text>The public interest is that interoperability standards should not require patented technology &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt; to implement.  The point of an interoperability standard is to allow a broad ecosystem with many producers and many consumers.  Here many producers of videos, many producers of video-processing and video-displaying technology, many consumers of these videos and associated technology.  The public interest is that the ecosystem should be vibrant, with easy access to new participants and low barriers to entry.&lt;p&gt;So, in the public interest, go Lenovo!  Especially considering the slime-ball tactics that Nokia apparently used here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>room500</author><text>AV1 is an open codec that I hope will be the industry standard soon. It already has the support of the ecosystem (apple, google, qualcomm, netflix, etc). Unfortunately, it just takes a while to build that momentum&lt;p&gt;So there is light at the end of the tunnel</text></comment>