The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

The Berne Convention has permanently burned us there

I am familiar with the Copyright Clause. You need to remind the courts, Congress, and rights holders, not me. If I had my way, rent seeking would be dead.

Interesting how you’ve chosen to interpret that section.

When I was in law school we were taught what seemed obvious then and is obvious now: that Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving authors and inventors exclusive right to the economic fruits of their works. You can argue about flaws in the system but it’s pretty laughable to suggest that copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.

There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent. It’s also why if a plaintiff is successful in a claim for an infringement of either, he’ll get awarded money in the United States that at a bare minimum is designed to compensate him for the money he would have made if the patent or copyright had been complied with. Europe has some different ideas about moral rights in this space, but since you’re quoting US material I assume you aren’t referring to our funny brothers across the pond.

It’s obvious to most people that humans act in certain ways due to incentives, and we like to incentivise invention and creativity in the West.

I really have a hard time accepting software patents. Like amazon patenting the one click to buy shopping cart for example. Crazy Taxi patented a directional arrow... The infamous "nemesis" patent for shadow of mordor.

IDK.... its all bits and bytes. This seems to stifle innovation more than anything imo.

I don’t think it matters in a practical sense. Our streaming overlords have already shown that by crippling the effective color space of supposedly 4K video they care little for quality of broadcast. Crushed blacks and smeared video are all you’ll get no matter what the standards say. They were, are and remain terrible on 1080 video, 4K is a farce.

Most videos are probably going to stay aimed near 30-40 degrees of width. So while we already can do 8k or higher pretty easily, 4k is enough for a huge amount of content. Even 1080p can hit "retina" at 30 degrees, if barely. And while that threshold for "retina" is flawed it's pretty good for video content.

We'll see how much 360 content shows up, but the size gap is so big it basically needs to be handled entirely differently. A 16x9 screen, 40 degrees wide, is only 2% of a sphere.

Of course.

I would hope so! Otherwise the Pareto front wouldn't have moved in ~20 years which would be rather hard to believe.

However, at the same time, h265, h266 and AV1 are all vastly more complicated, and will have less broad hardware acceleration support than h264, which, again, even if it is not optimally efficient use of compute, just doesn't require a whole lot by modern standards.

So I'd argue there is really no reason to be rushing away from h264 unless you have a compelling reason. There are some obvious compelling reasons in some cases; nobody is going to be terribly surprised that an entity like Netflix is eager to switch to codecs that will save bandwidth, because at their scale saving bytes definitely adds up, bonus points if it can increase the quality at the same time.

On the other hand, though, unless you are absolutely sure you can switch to only new codecs, you will probably want to keep some h264 encodings around to act as a fallback baseline for legacy devices. And thus, you also have to take into account the complexity brought on by needing to store and maintain multiple encodings - in many use cases, like simple <video>s thrown into website backgrounds, I can see just eating the extra bandwidth costs and keeping it all h264 as a valid strategy.

MPEG-2 video is still very much alive. In the US, almost all terrestrial OTA broadcast (ATSC 1.0) and all SD channels on cable systems. Even Comcast VOD was all MPEG-2 (including HD) until they shut down the QAM version in 2023.

H.263 was definitely a standard in videoconferencing and low-bitrate video in general (YouTube and many other streaming sutes used FLV1, which was a variant of H.263) prior to H.264.