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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why this article says "now". It was over 7, almost 8 years ago that the final patents on MP3 expired. There was even HN discussion at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240645

More notable is that many H.264 patents are expiring this year:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

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> I don't know why this article says "now". It was over 7, almost 8 years ago

“MP3 is now free. It was free seven years ago, but it is now too.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLAe3RyMDk

A Mitch Hedberg quote isn't as appreciated as it once was, but it still is!

I used to appreciate that mitch hedburg quote

Let's roll forward to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 and leave this unfortunate detour of history already.

So AV1 is patent free?

Grifters are gonna grift, but that is the expectation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Patent_claims

Patent free and royalty free are not the same thing.

The answer to the question "Is X patent-free" can never be yes until all possible patents have expired. I don't think it's really even possible to do much more than what AV1 is doing. Any patent known was avoided or is royalty-free.

> To fulfill the goal of being royalty free, the development process requires that no feature can be adopted before it has been confirmed independently by two separate parties to not infringe on patents of competing companies.

> [...] technology contributors license their AV1-connected patents to anyone, anywhere, anytime based on reciprocity (i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigation). As a defensive condition, anyone engaging in patent litigation loses the right to the patents of all patent holders.

> As an additional protection for the royalty-free status of AV1, the Alliance has a legal defense fund to aid smaller Alliance members or AV1 licensees in the event they are sued for alleged patent infringement.

I had not seen h.264 was finally freeing up. That's huge news to me.

Fedora supporting h264 OOTB will be a huge win. The current setup with mesa freeworld, rpmfusion, etc. is comically bad. Year of the linux desktop FTW.

What patent is needed to expire for them to support it?

That H.264 page is almost fantastically useful, except that I find it quite difficult to read the page and understand when the remaining US patents are due to expire. Maybe I am just too impatient!

I am hoping we could break those H.264 limits ( such as block size ) and brute force push compression higher with much higher computational requirement while still being patent free. I think with MPEG-5 EVC baseline which uses mostly expired patents shows that it is possible to reach HEVC level compression.

The situation with H.264 is complicated by the fact that it refers to a whole series of standards released over an extended period. The vast majority of H.264 videos in the wild only use the High profile which was first published in March of 2005, therefor any claim of essential patents covering these videos with an expiration date after March 2025 is dubious.

MPEG-LA tries to create FUD around this by lumping all H.264 patents into one big pool and never clarifying which edition of the standard a patent applies to. The end result is that anyone not already ignoring MPEG-LA's patents is unlikely to start until _all_ of the patents in MPEG-LA's H.264 pool have expired which is still several years out.

Which just means, they are free to add another bunch of patents for good measure. ^^

Patents are not valid if there is already public prior art.

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