That's because virtually 100% of patent holders use their patents defensively.

You missed the part where they knowingly allowed a patent to become part of a published open standard and ignored it for an entire decade, *then* started going after violations.

Oh, actually, it's worse than that. Dolby acquired these patents from General Electric two years ago. So in this matter, they quite literally ARE patent trolls. They did nothing to create this technology, but rather bought the patents to enrich themselves by becoming a leech on the industry now that companies are abandoning their codecs in favor of codecs whose encoders don't involve royalties.

You obviously don't understand patent law terminology, so let me give you a refresher:

• Defensive use of patents - patents held until someone sues you, then used to retaliate and make the other company's lawsuit more expensive and complex, usually resulting in a cross-licensing agreement.
• Offensive use of patents - suing someone else over the patent without having been previously sued by that someone else.

Suing multiple companies for violating a patent without getting sued first is the very definition of offensive use of a patent.

Those are actually separate lawsuits. (See link above.) The AV1 lawsuit is suing to stop them from using AV1 and force them to use a Dolby-licensed codec. They're also suing a Chinese hardware maker over AV1 at the same time.

The hell you can't. Patent infringement occurs on creating an instance of an invention. The moment they create source code for the software (an instantiation of the patent), they have violated the patent. It doesn't have to be instantiated into hardware or used by a business to be a violation. The patent violations began when AOMedia distributed the first beta versions a decade ago. The original patent holder (GE) did not sue.

To be fair, the reference implementation may not have been directly created or distributed by AOMedia, in which case the same applies, but to whatever company actually created and distributed it. This is largely an unimportant detail.

Businesses using products *also* infringe patents, which IMO, is a bad thing, but that's a separate discussion.

You literally didn't understand what I said.

Patent exhaustion occurs when a product is sold by someone who has the right to sell something that violates a patent, which typically means that either they own the patent or they paid licensing fees. It prevents someone from then suing downstream customers. And there is a six-year statute of limitations on suing over a patent violation. What I'm arguing is that:

• Distribution of open source software effectively occurs exactly once per version, because the redistribution permission inherent in open source software makes it impossible to determine whether a copy of the software was obtained directly from the creator on a particular date or from someone else who previously got it from the creator.
• Open source distribution is effectively a sale for patent purposes, just at zero cost.
• That sale occurred a decade ago when AOMedia distributed the reference implementation.
• Because no objection was made to that sale (against AOMedia) during the statutorily limited 6-year period, that sale should be considered to be an authorized sale, in which case patent exhaustion occurred on the results of that sale.
• All copies of the original reference implementation and their derivatives are therefore untouchable.

This is a legal theory. To my knowledge, it has never been tested in court, largely because companies do not do what Dolby is doing, suing companies for using open source reference implementations or their derivatives nearly a decade after their release. And it should be clear that this theory applies only to patents in the context of software.

The problem with the vast amount of hardware turf that Microsoft covers is different from say, Apples, because Apple highly controls their hardware platforms, and Microsoft by its nature, cannot.

Add in driver components, software legacies, and Microsoft users continue to pay this tax, generation after generation. So indeed these issues ARE similar.

When Oracle updates key functionality, they risk a domino effect, just as Microsoft does. The QA feedback loop can help, but all old code must become crusty because of physics. Reinventing the core code then causes its own ripple effects.

There are ways to fight this, at the risk of business partners going away-- the hardware makers and software vendors with huge installed bases.

Every time a change is made, it would be wonderful to do regression testing. That's why there are "insider" programs, the little beta site for these changes because regression testing today is impossible because the installation platforms are too diffuse.

There is truth in the aphorism, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall.".

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

That's the opposite of how that works. It's LGPL 2 or later. That means you can follow the terms of redistribution from either license. Either. Or.

It will do the same jobs. Most of the software on which we depend predates the GPL3 and/or uses an even more permissive license without an anti-tivoization clause.

Was it the monopoly that made the difference? Or was it simply management smart enough to not only not kill the goose, but also to feed it? They had wins, they got more funding, they had more wins, repeat until they no longer got more funding and stopped getting wins. What's probably more important than why they succeeded is what happened at the end.

If you're a Debian derivative user, it's called Devuan.

Otherwise...*

* Note: Removing systemd from a systemd-based system is madness. There's a reason Devuan exists, and it is that simply changing the init system on Debian results in a lot of breakage, which best illustrates the biggest problem with systemd.

Yes, that is literally the entire ethos behind systemd.

Yes, that is literally the entire situation with systemd.

This change literally could not be more on brand for systemd.

That's systemd in a nutshell. Only people like that would willingly work on a project like that.

The Linux kernel is GPL2 and glibc is LGPL, and you can construct a complete userland without any GPL3 components. Also, you seem to be under some weird misapprehension that the federal government will follow the law, which it has never done across the board.

Amendment XIII
Section 1: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".
Section 2: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation".

Emphasis mine.

Collaborators can get it.

Everyone is doing it wrong, that's why we need to sandbox.

Even if you were perfect, you wouldn't have time to do everything yourself, so you would still want sandboxing to protect you from the efforts of others.

Reply "yes", then close and reopen this message to activate the link.

No matter how idiot-proof you make technology, God will always create a better idiot. That's why the right way to solve this problem is:

• Make it as hard as possible for users to accidentally do something that is irreversible, and as easy as possible to roll back even serious mistakes. This means, among other things, keeping more than just a single backup. (Apple, I'm talking about your borderline useless iCloud backups here when I say that.)
• Make SSNs easily changeable and less easily guessable.
• Make it technologically as hard as possible to send out messages in a way where the sender's identity can be forged to look like it comes from someone else.
• Aggressively prosecute phone companies who allow calls and text messages onto their network from fake phone numbers.
• Aggressively track down, prosecute, and very publicly make an example of every person who tries to pull one of these scams, along with the people who employ them, so that anybody considering pulling such a scam is aware of previous scammers who have ended up behind bars for thirty to life within six months of starting their scam.

But IMO, the most important one is that last one. We would be a lot better off if the right to a speedy trial were taken seriously. If a year or more passes between committing a crime and being prosecuted, the threat of prosecution ceases to be a meaningful deterrent to crime.

If I were in charge, there would be two nationwide statutes of limitations added that apply to all crimes:

• Charges must be filed within six months* of law enforcement having solid evidence showing who committed a crime. Just cause must be shown for any exceptions to this. If the law enforcement fails to show that they received significant supporting evidence that made it possible to bring their case during the six month period prior to filing charges, the charges are automatically dropped.
• Cases must begin within thirty days* of bringing charges. If the case cannot begin within 30 days, the charges are dropped.

* I'm willing to consider arguments that these numbers should be slightly higher, but not dramatically so.

If legitimate extenuating circumstances outside the control of prosecution warrant a delay (e.g. the defendant being impossible to locate or in another country), a judge could order the statute of limitations tolled. But otherwise, the only exceptions should be in situations where a mistrial or similar forces a new trial (which obviously starts more than 30 days after the initial charges are filed). And even for a retrial, there should be a hard limit of maybe 90 days from the end of the previous trial or thereabouts.

This would result in a very large number of cases not getting prosecuted, but by forcing the prosecution to triage cases and bring important cases quickly, it would ensure that fear of being brought to justice would be a real deterrent to committing crimes. Right now, it is not. Good people don't (intentionally) commit crimes, because they have morality and ethics. Bad people do, because they have neither. Almost nobody avoids doing crime merely out of fear of punishment, and that's a bad thing.

I would still consider them patent trolls at this point. Legitimate patent holders use patents immediately or hold them to use defensively. They do not sit on patents for an entire decade, waiting for the patented technology to be ingrained in the industry, and then use them to earn income. The patent having been created in-house rather than acquired doesn't change the fact that the behavior is fundamentally similar.

Dolby Atmos was 2012. Dolby Vision was 2014. How are they not basically a non-practicing entity at this point?

Yes, but using them offensively after sitting on them violates the doctrine of Laches. In effect, they sat on the patents so that people would end up depending on AV1, because if they sued too early, AOMedia would have designed around the patent, and they would get nothing. So they deliberately delayed action to cause prejudice to the defendant.

At this point, it would be entirely reasonable for a judge to declare that because they failed to act against AOMedia within the 6-year window prescribed by patent law, they lost their right to sue AOMedia for damages in creating the patented technology, and that patent exhaustion applies to all downstream users. And if that happens, I will laugh so hard.

Dolby is not a startup. It was founded in 1965.

Also, the doctrine of Laches says you cannot unreasonably delay filing a lawsuit. Waiting ten years from the first release of the specification is clearly unreasonable. Waiting eight years from the first finished implementation is clearly unreasonable.

The bigger problem for Dolby is that patent law won't let you recover damages at all for damages more than six years ago, and the standard has been available for eight. So unless somehow this is some wacky patent where Dolby claims that some use of an otherwise non-patent-protected codec is patented (which should almost certainly result in that patent getting overturned for obviousness), Dolby should be laughed out of court.

But I'm sure they're hoping that Snapchat caves and agrees to go back to a Dolby codec or pay them royalties rather than fight them in court. This is patent troll behavior. Dolby has effectively become a patent troll, IMO.