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Have the patents for H.264 MPEG-4 AVC expired yet?
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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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How? If the tech is older than 25 years, it's prior art no matter what. MP3 is fully free for the same reasons.
Happened recently with a 1995 patent by a Stratasys, on a stronger technique for 3D printing using a brick infill method.
Someone re-parented a variation to prevent it being public domain until 2040.
So the variation cannot be used. That's irrelevant for a file format. Some company could, for example, patent a more efficient encoding technique but the resulting file format is still public domain. So at worst an open source encoder would need to be slightly inefficient because it uses the traditional technique.
Okay, pay X amount of dollars to go say that in a few court cases, and hope you get a judge that understands.
That's why it's called Patent Trolling because it's not official or legitimate.
Didn't happen with MP3.
Sort of. That was more of an oversight from a half assed patent filing based on a little known 3d printing process that shouldn't have been approved and is still up for challenge. That isn't likely to happen with H.264. I'd go as far to say that it couldn't happen with it.
This is why we can't have nice things...