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Comment by layoutIfNeeded | Hacker News Reader

What is the patent situation with Raptor codes nowadays?

We have a license and use them for satellite broadcasting, but my understanding is Qualcomm has made statements in https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1511/ that if you use it for a "wireless wide-area standard (for example, a UMTS-compatible handset or Infrastructure equipment)" you'll be charged a standard royalty fee, otherwise they don't care.

... as long as you use it for implementing a specific IETF specification. At least that how it reads to me?

Sure, I guess? I don't see why you'd want to deviate from the RFC6330 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6330 - stuff like this is complicated a.f.

Noob question: Any reason folks would use FountainCode/RaptorQ over TurboCode [0] / PolarCode [1]? What's the difference?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_code

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_code_(coding_theory)

I do not think the "non-fountain" style of error correction has the nice property of "just grab any reasonable fraction of the packets and you will get to decode the whole message". With a Turbo/LDPC/Polar/etc code you encode a packet, send it, and when it is received it is either decoded or not, but there is no notion of a message spread redundantly over many packets, where any n of them are enough for the decoding of the full message.

Was just coming to ask the same question. Last I remember fountain codes were pretty locked down.

The inventor of Raptor codes, M. Amin Shokrollahi, sold his company, Digital Fountain, to Qualcomm. Upon the sale to Qualcomm, Qualcomm acquired all of Digital Fountain's IP rights.

Qualcomm has asserted that these Raptor code-related patents (an early one of which was filed in 2004) are standards essential, and require to be licensed from Qualcomm.[1][2]

The below-linked patent would expire in 2024. However, there are a slew of continuation applications that expire much later than 2024.

Update: additionally, there is at least one earlier-dated patent filed in 1999, which expired in February. [3]

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/2554/

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7139960

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6307487

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