throwawaykf05

> Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11]

This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.

Comment · 10 years ago

> In what way is it "doing harm" to the patent system?

Well here's a study showing that the user of the term "troll" had become widely used by media without any evidence to support their negative views. This has led to judges forbidding the use of that term at trials as it is unfairly prejudicial.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2768939

If it is improper in the court of law, one can reasonably assume it is improper in the court of public opinion as well. The effects of this bias can be seen in the usual comments on patent-related threads here and other forums, where the USPTO is regularly derided by people who don't know the first thing about patents. These people know only what the media tells them, and as the paper shows, media is highly biased. This bias is being spread to a large audience and is also being used to push for reform that may not necessarily be balanced. I'd say, yes, such rhetoric is hurting the patent system.

Comment · 10 years ago

> ... grant a more even balance between the financial interests of the rightsholders and the cultural interests of the public at large...

You mean the public that still exchanges terabytes [1] of pirated content every month in the US alone that the rights holders are unable to stop?

1. Sandvine estimates single digit percentage of daily Internet traffic in the US is BitTorrent. That is huge in absolute numbers.

Comment · 10 years ago

The main reasons Netflix, Spotify and their ilk exist are a) piracy is still not user-friendly enough for everyone, and b) people vastly overestimate the risk of getting caught for piracy. Both of these are largely due to the incessant efforts of copyright holders exerting their legal rights. We are, in the large, homo economicus.

Comment · 10 years ago

> TV and Movie owners already have copyright laws and DMCA laws giving them legal control on who gets their content and how it is used.

And you have property laws giving you legal control over who gets your physical property and how it gets used. You could, for instance, loan your car to your family all you want, or agencies can rent their cars out as they wish. But the moment some stranger makes off with it, the government law enforcement agencies are obliged to help.

The legal distribution of content is a free market -- there is no government price setting agency and no monopoly more than other forms of ownership -- the public only needs to be better educated about what they are paying for.

Comment · 10 years ago

IIRC, it was some bytes of object code they copied to be interoperable, so that string could just as well have been an array of random numbers as far as being the key to interoperability was concerned.

Comment · 10 years ago

> Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first

Yes but my point is AWS has more mindshare and MS has more leverageable pre-existing business inroads with a huge number of these corporations.

> and Google has done a great job building a solid foundation for this which should pay dividends in the future

That seems rational, but the countless examples of "worse is better" in life indicate that that outcome is far from guaranteed.

Comment · 10 years ago

"We can only send you the data as fast as we can get it from Netflix. Please try speedtest.net, speedof.me or testmy.net to check your actual speed."

Comment · 10 years ago

Is not wanting to peer with somebody for free a violation of net neutrality?

Comment · 10 years ago

Microsoft put billions into Windows Phone and many (including me) think it's superior to iOS and Android, but what's its market share now? What I mean is, even if it is technically better, will Google Cloud get customers? AWS has a huge head start with significant mindshare, and Microsoft has its pre-existing enterprise customers sewed up. With tech funding drying up, where will Google find its customers?

Comment · 10 years ago

Says the guy paid by Google. Tell me, when Alsup issued his "name your shills" order, was yours amongst those Google released? I certainly see you (or at least your handle) commenting on various Google-related threads here and on Ars.