from Hacker News

Google offered free slice, wants whole cake

by boxerab on 6/18/17, 11:59 PM with 2 comments

Asymmetric Numerical System (ANS) is a new compression algorithm that matches compression ratios of previous state-of-the-art encoders at up to 30X speed up.

Jarek Duda introduced ANS about 10 years ago and freely donated it to the compression community by publishing extensively and helping Google for three years to apply ANS to the open source AV1 video compression codec.

His hope was to avoid what happened to arithmetic coding, which was locked up by patents for 20 years.

Now history is repeating itself: Google has applied for a very general patent for ANS and video compression.

Reddit Discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_is_currently_trying_to_patent_video/

Encode.ru Discussion:

https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Storeleap/page3

The detailed claims for this patent can be found here: https://register.epo.org/ipfwretrieve?apn=US.201615370840.A&lng=en

There is plenty of prior art that should invalidate such a patent.

If you would like to electronically submit prior art related to this patent application, do the following: (submission is free for up to 3 pieces of prior art)

1) Read Guide https://patents.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-to-make-a-difference-how-can-i-submit-prior-art-to-the-patent-office

2) Visit USPTO website https://efs.uspto.gov/EFSWebUIUnregistered/EFSWebUnregistered

3) select "Existing application/patent"

4) select "Third-Party Preissuance Submission under 37 CFR 1.290"

"Application number" : 15/370840 "Confirmation number": 5111

  • by johng on 6/19/17, 12:51 AM

    So, Google has been becoming quite evil for a while. My personal one is scraping people's pages and offering the scraped advice for free, without leaving the main google search -- thus getting free advertising dollars from this knowledge without supplying anything back to the scraped site. Now, they are taking prior art that was given to the community and trying to patent it.... sigh. Everyone else, do no evil... for us, it's fine.