Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0245
Back in 2015, Personal Audio's claimed patent was invalidated by a federal court.
Podcasters, you can now engage in your lengthy Maron opens without the feeling of being legally targeted by a Texas company that many would consider to be a patent troll.
On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case of Personal Audio v. Electronic Frontier Foundation. In short, the case is all said and done.
As Ars reported in August 2017, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the April 2015 inter partes review (IPR) ruling—a process that allows anyone to challenge a patent's validity at the US Patent and Trademark Office.
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Supreme Court Declines to Hear “Podcasting Patent” Case, Handing Win to EFF
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:24PM
I was having a bad day, but hearing that a patent troll is having a worse one makes it just a little bit better :)
The patent office is like the death penalty. Good in theory, but corrupt as fuck in practice.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:44PM (21 children)
I have many good reasons. I suggested he and I engage in a public debate, but Richard said he was too busy with his existing work. In my understanding his work is the evangelism of Free Software, mostly through public speaking.
I invented a lossless bitmap compression algorithm and file format in 1994. I honestly believe that invention is worthy of a patent. However I asked my employer to file the patent but it was forgotten about when Medior was acquired by AOL.
I have since come up with some improvements - one can patent improvements even if you don't own the patent that you're improving.
I don't want to tell anybody what my compression inventions are until either the patent is issued or I decide not to patent them.
However:
Surely you must agree that Haim Zamir's Edge Highlighter is worthy of a patent: Method and System for Mask Generation [google.com].
Patents eventually expire; I'm not clear whether Haim's is expired. Thus patents benefit everybody. Had Live Picture not patented Haim's invention it would have been a trade secret that quite likely would have been forgotten about with LP's bankrupcy.
I understand Damascus Steel has finally been reverse-engineer. Being an Assyrian military secret no one but ancient Assyrians knew how to make it. Metallurgy is particularly difficult to reverse engineer because you need to know the process and not just the ingredients.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday May 15 2018, @09:17PM
Software patents are pointless since any truly useful optimization will be baked into the hardware where patents already exist as heavy silicon cartels patent pools to force their way. This, while less useful software innovations are / will be tweaked around to circumvent the patents at small performance/power costs. Doubly so for compression, encoding and encryption techniques.
Source: History.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday May 16 2018, @02:10AM (8 children)
It wasn't. It did nothing but specify a mathematical algorithm.
No, it isn't. It does nothing but specify a mathematical algorithm.
Patents benefit only the patent owner. Perhaps the basic idea of a patent can potentially be worthy of consideration, but such a system invariably degrades into one that causes much more harm than good. It's where the world's patent system has been for many years now.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:38AM (7 children)
and what's your take on it now being in the public domain?
Rivest, Shamir and Adelson IIRC could have sold it to a company that would have kept it as a trade secret, perhaps implemented only in obfuscated hardware so as to make "discovering the source code" quite difficult.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @07:41AM (1 child)
In which case it wouldn't be reviewed and thus not considered secure.
At least until someone else came up with the idea of multiplying large prime numbers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:10AM
The NSA never discloses crypto secrets even to the diplomats and military personnel who use them in their work.
The best anyone ever knows is that the "NSA approved it".
From time to time the NSA withdraws its approval. This because there is a separate department in the NSA who cryptanalyzes every proposed algorithm. That department never "approves" anything, they only tell the department that creates proposed algorithms that "we cracked it".
Were the Soviets ever to have cracked one of our algoriths quite likely the way These United States would have found out about it was when a couple sub-launched missiles vaporized DC as well as New York City.
That "disapproval department" NEVER gets the source code, they only have a black box which, if they're really lucky, from time to time they can feed it some chosen plaintext.
Source: James Bamford, "The Puzzle Palace", Ninth Edition.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:06PM (3 children)
It it hadn't been patentable, it would have eventually made it into the public consciousness. At that point, some interested parties would have created something very similar. It always happens.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:39PM (2 children)
Extensive googling has yet to turn up any ideas similar to those of my lossless bitmap compressor, nor to its file format.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @05:30PM (1 child)
Does it perform significantly better than 7zip?
I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that lossless compression was a dead field as it has basically reached it's theoretical maximum.
The emphasis now is on lossy compression as the art of learning where you can lose data and not have people notice it is still vibrant.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:09AM
... to decompress. It's also dead-simple to implement decompression in C. That suggests it might be straightforward to implement in in an FPGA, with possible lucrative applications for ASIC such as spy satellites.
It's dog-slow to compress, however: it only is useful if you compress just once then decompress a whole bunch of times.
It's intended application was to replace GIF's LZW dog-slow LZW decompression on 20 MHz Windows 3.1 boxen. Our first use of it was for Medior's 2Market Home Shopping multimedia CD-ROM - that shipped _just_ in time for black friday!
With four GIFs on each page of 2Market's catalogs, the Win GIF decompression was distressingly lagging when one browsed from page to page.
We didn't use it on Mac OS because Apple's PICT bitmap compression was implemented in hand-optimized assembly by The Devil Incarnate.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:17AM
If not RSA, we'd be using a variation on Diffie-Hellman which is backed by similar mathematics. In fact, a minor variation on the D-H exchange that can be used as a public key system was known at the same time as RSA's work. Meanwhile, D-H was a re-discovery of something British Sigint worked out 7 years earlier. Look past the 50,000 foot overview of any invention and you'll most likely find others who would have invented the thing (or actually DID) but stopped once the patent office picked a winner.
The actual bolt from the blue invention is exceedingly rare
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday May 16 2018, @02:26AM (3 children)
Since I haven't seen your idea, I can't comment on it, but I can comment on image compression in general.
Given the way storage capacity and bandwidth has drastically expanded, a better lossless compression method is of limited utility. Not to say it's not useful, but nobody's going to pay a lot for anything less than an astoundingly superior scheme. Even if it truly is astounding, there's only so much it might potentially be worth to someone.
Meanwhile, to even get the patent filed on a shoestring, it's going to cost north of $10K.
Litigating it would cost millions should it come to that.
Meanwhile, for all you know there's 3 more people out there who also don't want to talk about it until they either patent it or decide not to. Imagine how you might feel if one of them does and you can't use your own idea (that they also had) ever again. The all or nothing nature of patents is part of the problem.
Note, I'm not at all saying you don't deserve to benefit from innovating, just the opposite. I'm just pointing out that the patent system is at least as likely to keep you from benefiting as it is to help you. And I note that you're not benefiting now.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:11AM (1 child)
"National Reconnaissance Office".
Spy sattelites require lossless image compression.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday May 16 2018, @11:22PM
Yes, but that's not the question. The question is, do they need better lossless compression than they have now, and how badly.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:14AM
A few years back Congress passed a law that holds that the winner is "First To File". Before that it was "First To Invent" which meant that one had to meticulously keep a lab notebook every page of which was notarized.
Alexander Graham Bell was first to file. Close but no cigar - and almost forgotten to history - filed just a few hours later.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @07:39AM (6 children)
Software patents don't expire until they are irrelevant.
The GIF patent expired recently, so now we can have 8-bit images... When we are arguing about The Gimp being inadequate, because it doesn't support higher than 24-bit.
The MP3 patent has expired in some countries, but not everywhere yet. It's also been replaced with FLAC, Opus, AAC or Apple Lossless for everything except phone ringtones and Chinese-made MP3 players.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:16AM (5 children)
Because MP3 is "good enough".
I have some in FLAC but I can't play them in iTunes so I use VLC. While I could in principle play them on my iPhone, the user reviews at the App Store clearly state that every last iOS FLAC player sucks rocks.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:30AM (3 children)
As an Apple user, you should be using Apple Lossless or AAC.
MP3 is "good enough" if you're listening in a car or other noisy environment, and don't care about file size. AAC and Opus get the same crappy quality at about half the size.
I still use CDs. I tried to encode one to MP3, and the very first electric guitar note got so distorted that it was unbearable on anything below 320Kbit (highest quality). At 320Kbit, it merely sounds like something that can be recognized as an electric guitar.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:36AM (2 children)
To listen to 192 tracks for a few hours makes me feel very weary.
That doesn't happen with 320.
However I will say that I can tell the difference between 320 and FLAC when I use reasonably decent speakers and my crypto mining rig is powered off. When the rig is operating I can't hear the difference.
Apple Lossless wouldn't fit even on my 256 GB iPhone 7. Even with MP3, at 320 I barely have enough storage.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 16 2018, @03:55PM (1 child)
That is interesting in that most psychoacoustic research I'm familiar with for voice and music codecs has always been based on very short term A/B testing or listening comprehension style intelligibility surveys. I'm not immediately aware of any codec design work done for long term listener fatigue and I could certainly predict that weird IMD distortion would eventually result in long term listener fatigue.
Keeping it on topic, you should run out and patent that business method, LOL. Something like extend the concept of short term A/B testing to an analysis of listener fatigue after six hours of exposure.
I'm familiar with "proof" or at least lame studies that most humans can't A/B 192 vs 320 given bug free codecs and typical music, of course thats also proves its not good enough for everyone, only for most, and it seems quite possible the varying low level distortion causes varying levels of listener fatigue.
Probably real academic research exists on the topic, but a quickie google mostly finds audiophile stuff of the "green market" and "oxygen free copper" variety.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:42PM
You me was well as every last Soylentil is in the wrong line of work:
Some right chaps sell Speaker Wire Suspenders that elevate said wires roughly five inches - 5.08 centimeters - off the floor that cost over a hundred bucks apiece
For me to elevate my own particular wires would set me back 600 clams.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:30AM
More properly, because FLAC is too big and aac is too patented. I predict we'll see a lot of MP3 until the patents on AAC expire. Then we'll see lots of AAC.