The next frontier in IP parasites: codec royalties on content

&gt; The first really good video codec was MPEG-4 H.264. I remember in 2001 my housemate watching a movie on his telly — playing off a CD-R. A whole movie crammed onto a CD, encoded with DivX!<p>H264 didn&#x27;t exist in 2001. At the time DivX was really a hacked Microsofts codec to allow encodes outside of .ASF files. This MS codec was a decent codec using standard Mpeg4 part 2 Simple Profile.<p>XviD was opensource effort to ditch ms hacked codec, and eventually it went to support other profiles, like ASP (advanced simple profile).<p>Much later some enterprising people figured that they could ride on the DivX name popularity. So they wrote own mpeg4 part2 codec and called themselves DivX LLC. Even much later this company also released h264 and h265 codecs. Hence maybe the confusion by the article author on what was used in 2001.

This article has a quote saying even AV1 is not safe from patent trolls. I&#x27;m interested in hearing more, I thought AV1 was as safe as it gets.

While I strongly dislike software patents, I believe they might be the only way left how a single person inventor can profit off his&#x2F;her invention. Without patent protection, there&#x27;s nothing stopping large companies from just using your algorithms without ever paying you, the inventor. I mean they do it to each other all the time because in many instances, racing ahead first and then settling lawsuits later is just more profitable than delaying your market entry until you negotiated all licencing agreements.<p>So yes, we should abolish software patents. But we do need a replacement or it&#x27;ll incur a massive power shift from employees to companies.

I was reading about compression algorithms recently and this reminded me of the mess of LZW compression being used in GIF images.