Comment Expired patents of little use in this game (Score 1) 395
By a conscious decision Vorbis *is* based off technology which is old enough to be expired if it ever was patented. That was part of the fundamental strategy in the Vorbis design.
Vorbis' floor system? Based off the earliest speech codecs. Vorbis' stereo system? based off the encoding used in records. Vorbis' psy model? taken directly from research papers from the 1960s. Vorbis' entropy coder? it's just a simple huffman coder!
The brilliance of Vorbis is that it's the result of finely optimizing the best of the oldest ideas.
However, the composition or implementation of the ideas might still run afoul of some idiotic patent. This is a risk that simply can't be avoided. It's a fundamental vulnerability that ALL software has thanks to our patent system. Even implementing an old algorithm in a new programming language can create a patent minefield.
So yes, what you propose will make a codec patent resistant. ... but Vorbis is already there. And thats obviously not good enough for you, or the W3C. As such, your proposal is worthless. You seem to want certain immunity from patents, but that just isn't possible, even if you're willing to accept unreasonable concessions
.
Vorbis' floor system? Based off the earliest speech codecs. Vorbis' stereo system? based off the encoding used in records. Vorbis' psy model? taken directly from research papers from the 1960s. Vorbis' entropy coder? it's just a simple huffman coder!
The brilliance of Vorbis is that it's the result of finely optimizing the best of the oldest ideas.
However, the composition or implementation of the ideas might still run afoul of some idiotic patent. This is a risk that simply can't be avoided. It's a fundamental vulnerability that ALL software has thanks to our patent system. Even implementing an old algorithm in a new programming language can create a patent minefield.
So yes, what you propose will make a codec patent resistant.
.
