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Court orders Acer and Asus to stop selling PCs in Germany over H.265 patents

77 points by ledoge

by jimrandomh

3 subcomments

I haven't dug into the case or the ruling, but this looks like an incorrect court decision and probably an extortion racket. The problem is that, in the supply chain that ends in a completed PC, the system integrator (Acer/Asus) is not the place where video codecs come into the picture. There may be patent-infringing H265 decoding hardware inside the GPU, but Acer and Asus would have purchased GPUs as a standard component. There may be infringing H265 decoding software in the operating system, but again, they would have purchased that as a standard component.
And, realistically, I don't think anyone actually wants patent-encumbered video codecs; we're just stuck with them because bad patent law has allowed companies to have a monopoly over math, hurting the quality of unencumbered codecs, and because the patented codecs have wormed their way into standards so that they're required for interoperability.

by intunderflow

3 subcomments

> Munich court
This court is famous for being a racket. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264

by Kim_Bruning

1 subcomments

So a near-Non Practicing Entity is enforcing standards-essential software patents in a European court, under arguably unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory terms.
That's a lot of things the European Patent system is supposed to prevent, and exposes quite a number of loopholes.

by amelius

0 subcomment

Hopefully at some point we can agree that communication standards should not be patentable. (And this includes file systems and font typefaces).

by Neywiny

2 subcomments

Truly the worst codec, legally speaking. Cannot believe we're still fighting these things. I've never seen anybody have any such issues with H.264, AV1, VP9, or any of the older ones. Just like HDMI woes it's a shame that the heavily regulated standards won out over more open or fully open.

by fancyfredbot

1 subcomments

I have a feeling the days of patent encumbered video codecs will come to an end soon and be replaced with some kind of autoencoder, or at least the decoder part. It should be possible to match or exceed the compression achieved by H.265, although the decoder would probably consume more energy and cost more. The cool thing about autoencoder compression is that at high compression rates it'll still look like a high resolution image, it'll just be of the wrong scene!

by digiown

1 subcomments

Meanwhile, over the border in France, software patents aren't a thing. That's why VLC gets to ignore it, by the way.

by Our_Benefactors

3 subcomments

It’s such a shame as h265 is such an amazing codec breakthrough. I’m in the process of converting my library for space saving and the h265 files are literally 50% of the original size (give or take), with imperceptible quality difference. I can reencode around 100-200GB/day typically, using a 3090

by conartist6

0 subcomment