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compression patents suck! | 758 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

compression patents suck!

Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 03:47 PM EDT

Plus I'll just throw in a reminder here that patents on mathematical algorithms
(compression algorithms) retarded progress in the field of data compression for
at least 10 to 15 years. Arithmetic encoding was patented dozens of ways. (And
an equivalent mathematical construct, range encoding, was in the public domain
since the 70's, but stupid lawyers never noticed that these two pieces of
_abstract mathematics_ were effectively the same mathematical computation).

Remember the .GIF file format? Yeah, not many people do. You know why? It was
killed off by patents, thats why. The owner of the patent tried to extort money
from parties using the format, so everyone stopped using it and started using
.PNG and .JPG instead.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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