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

https://videocardz.com/newz/acer-and-asus-are-now-banned-from-selling-pcs-and-laptops-in-germany-following-nokia-hevc-patent-ruling

33•ledoge•2h ago

Comments

jimrandomh•1h ago

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.

josephg•39m ago

As I understand it, this is a pretty common legal problem that shows up when multiple parties collaborate to make something. And the result turns out to be legally problematic in some way. Its often incredibly difficult for the plaintiff to figure out who's really legally responsible - especially since they don't have access to all the supplier contracts that were signed. And all the suppliers will probably blame each other in court.

Looking at this case, if we assume there is infringing software / hardware inside these laptops, then figuring out which supplier is to blame is Acer/asus's problem. Its not up to nokia to go through all the contracts.

Its kinda like in software. If I install your software and it crashes, don't blame your 3rd party libraries. I don't care why it crashes. Figure it out and fix it.

Philosophically, I completely agree with you about software patents. I don't even mind these legal battles because they push companies toward the patent-free AV1 codec.

impossiblefork•31m ago

It doesn't matter where codecs come in the picture. If they're selling something which infringes the patent, they're selling something that infringes that patent. It doesn't matter if they bought the part that actually does the infringing bit from someone else.

intunderflow•1h ago

> Munich court

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

arianvanp•58m ago

Munich court is terrible. A disgrace to democracy. They also allow terrorizing of citizens for "copyright infringement" through siding with Movie industry. All ISPs just hand over your personal data to these copyright trolls no questions asked. They literally surveil everyone's Internet unchecked to extort people for money

Neywiny•52m ago

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.

sam1714•44m ago

Lucent v. Microsoft, $1.53 billion over MP3

josephg•34m ago

H264 is controlled by the same consortium as H265. The only difference is that many of the h264 patents have expired over the last couple of years.

The free version of davinci resolve still doesn't include h264 support - presumably because they don't want to poke the bear. (h264 still works on macos because apple pays the licensing fees, and resolve uses the macos encoder & decoder.)

amelius•40m ago

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

Kim_Bruning•39m ago

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.

zokier•33m ago

> arguably unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory terms

I'll bite. How do you argue that?

Our_Benefactors•27m ago

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

jackvalentine•9m ago

Assuming you’re using FFMPEG?

Do you have a good guide for balancing quality and size? I’ve searched but never found something that really nails it for me. I have until now just been keeping everything as it streamed off the dvd or bluray in mpeg4 or h264 in an mkv and yeah, time to re-encode in to something more reasonably sized.

fancyfredbot•15m ago

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!

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