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• Trolls in trouble

  6 juin 2013, par Mans — Law and liberty

  Life as a patent troll is hopefully set to get more difficult. In a memo describing patent trolls as a “drain on the American economy,” the White House this week outlined a number of steps it is taking to stem this evil tide. Chiming in, the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (where patent cases are heard) in a New York Times op-ed laments the toll patent trolling is taking on the industry, and urges judges to use powers already at their disposal to make the practice less attractive. However, while certainly a step in the right direction, these measures all fail to address the more fundamental properties of the patent system allowing trolls to exist in the first place.

  System and method for patent trolling

  Most patent trolling operations comprise the same basic elements :

  1. One or more patents with broad claims.
  2. The patents of (1) acquired by an otherwise non-practising entity (troll).
  3. The entity of (2) filing numerous lawsuits alleging infringement of the patents of (1).
  4. The lawsuits of (3) targeting end users or retailers.
  5. The lawsuits of (3) listing as plaintiffs difficult to trace shell companies.

  The recent legislative actions all take aim at the latter entries in this list. In so doing, they will no doubt cripple the trolls, but the trolls will remain alive, ready to resume their wicked ways once a new loophole is found in the system.

  To kill a patent troll

  As Judge Rader and his co-authors point out in the New York Times, “the problem stems largely from the fact that, [...] trolls have an important strategic advantage over their adversaries : they don’t make anything.” This is the heart of the troll, and this is where the blow should be struck. Our weapon shall be the mightiest judicial sword of all, the Constitution.

  The United States Constitution contains (in Article I, Section 8) the foundation for the patent system (emphasis mine) :

  The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

  Patent trolls are typically not inventors. They are merely hoarders of other people’s discarded inventions, and that allowing others to reap the benefits of an inventor’s work would somehow promote progress should be a tough argument. Indeed, it is the dissociation between investment and reward which has allowed the patent trolls to rise and prosper.

  In light of the above, the solution to the troll menace is actually strikingly simple : make patents non-transferable.

  Having the inventor retain the rights to his or her inventions (works for hire still being recognised), would render the establishment of non-practising entities, which most trolls are, virtually impossible. The original purpose of patents, to protect the investment of inventors, would remain unaffected, if not strengthened, by such a change.

  Links

  • Taking on Patent Trolls to Protect American Innovation
  • Fact Sheet : White House Task Force on High-Tech Patent Issues
  • Make Patent Trolls Pay in Court
  • Constitution of the United States

• The New Samples Regime

  1er décembre 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  A little while ago, I got a big head over the fact that I owned and controlled the feared and revered MPlayer samples archive. This is the repository that retains more than a decade of multimedia samples.

  Conflict
  Where once there was one multimedia project (FFmpeg), there are now 2 (also Libav). There were various political and technical snafus regarding the previous infrastructure. I volunteered to take over hosting the vast samples archive (53 GB at the time) at samples.mplayerhq.hu (s.mphq for this post).

  However, a brand new server is online at samples.libav.org (s.libav for this post).

  Policies
  The server at s.libav will be the authoritative samples repository going forward. Why does s.libav receive the honor ? Mostly by virtue of having more advanced features. My simple (yet bandwidth-rich) web hosting plan does not provide for rsync or anonymous FTP services, both of which have traditionally been essential for the samples server. In the course of hosting s.mphq for the past few months, a few more discrepancies have come to light– apparently, the symlinks weren’t properly replicated. And perhaps most unusual is that if a directory contains a README file, it won’t be displayed in the directory listing (which frustrated me greatly when I couldn’t find this README file that I carefully and lovingly crafted years ago).

  The s.mphq archive will continue to exist — nay, must exist — going forward since there are years’ worth of web links pointing into it. I’ll likely set up a mirroring script that periodically (daily) rsyncs from s.libav to my local machine and then uses lftp (the best facility I have available) to mirror the files up to s.mphq.

  Also, since we’re starting fresh with a new upload directory, I think we need to be far more ruthless about policing its content. This means making sure that anything that is uploaded has an accompanying file which explains why it’s there and ideally links the sample to a bug report somewhere. No explanation = sample terminated.

  RSS
  I think it would be nifty to have an RSS feed that shows the latest samples to appear in the repository. I figure that I can use the Unix ‘find’ command on my local repository in concert with something like PyRSS2Gen to accomplish this goal.

  Monetization
  In the few months that I have been managing the repository, I have had numerous requests for permission to leech the entire collection in one recursive web-suck. These requests often from commercial organizations who wish to test their multimedia product on a large corpus of diverse samples. Personally, I believe the archive makes a rather poor corpus for such an endeavor, but so be it. Go ahead ; hosting this archive barely makes a dent in my fairly low-end web hosting plan. However, at least one person indicated that it might be easier to mail a hard drive to me, have me copy it, and send it back.

  This got me thinking about monetization opportunities. Perhaps, I should provide a service to send HDs filled with samples for the cost of the HD, shipping, and a small donation to the multimedia projects. I immediately realized that that is precisely the point at which the vast multimedia samples archive — with all of its media of questionable fair use status — would officially run afoul of copyright laws.

  Which brings me to…

  Clean Up
  I think we need to clean up some samples, starting with the ones that were marked not-readable in the old repository. Apparently, some ‘samples’ were, e.g., full anime videos and were responsible for a large bandwidth burden when linked from various sources.

  We multimedia nerds are a hoarding lot, never willing to throw anything away. This will probably the most challenging proposal to implement.

• avconv : Saving MP4 is Taking Hours

  4 septembre 2015, par PeregrineStudios

  not entirely sure if I should post this on askubuntu or stackoverflow. Posted on askubuntu and not getting any answers. I’m hoping I can find an answer here.

  I’m setting up a website where users can upload videos and share them. I’m using avconv to reduce the video size and save it twice, once as an mp4 and again as a webm.

  Uploading a .MOV from a phone, the video conversion is quick and manageable.

  Uploading a .mp4 from a Samsung Galaxy S3, the video conversion to webm is also quick. But, the conversion to another mp4 takes FOREVER - literally hours. Why ? Is anyone able to shed light on the problem ?

  My avconv output is below.

  avconv -i /var/www/dev_jackpine/ottawa2017/temp_videos/37a949071acaee714dae829ca8df9b29.mp4 -c:v libx264 -vf transpose=1,transpose=1,transpose=1 -s 640x480 /var/www/dev_jackpine/ottawa2017/spinnies/test.mp4
  
  avconv version 0.8.17-4:0.8.17-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2014 the Libav developers
  
  built on Mar 16 2015 13:26:50 with gcc 4.6.3
  
  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '/var/www/dev_jackpine/ottawa2017/temp_videos/37a949071acaee714dae829ca8df9b29.mp4':
  
    Metadata:
  
      major_brand     : isom
  
      minor_version   : 0
  
      compatible_brands: isom3gp4
  
      creation_time   : 2015-09-04 15:08:21
  
  Duration: 00:00:07.76, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 11756 kb/s
  
  Stream #0.0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline), yuv420p, 1280x720, 11967 kb/s, 29.81 fps, 90k tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc
  
  Metadata:
  
    creation_time   : 2015-09-04 15:08:21
  
  Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 119 kb/s
  
  Metadata:
  
    creation_time   : 2015-09-04 15:08:21
  
  File '/var/www/dev_jackpine/ottawa2017/spinnies/test.mp4' already exists. Overwrite ? [y/N] y
  
  [buffer @ 0xc3d580] w:1280 h:720 pixfmt:yuv420p
  
  [scale @ 0xc3dac0] w:1280 h:720 fmt:yuv420p -> w:640 h:480 fmt:yuv420p flags:0x4
  
  [transpose @ 0xc3e280] w:640 h:480 dir:1 -> w:480 h:640 rotation:clockwise vflip:0
  
  [transpose @ 0xc3e7c0] w:480 h:640 dir:1 -> w:640 h:480 rotation:clockwise vflip:0
  
  [transpose @ 0xc3ede0] w:640 h:480 dir:1 -> w:480 h:640 rotation:clockwise vflip:0
  
  [libx264 @ 0xc2b100] MB rate (108000000) > level limit (983040)
  
  [libx264 @ 0xc2b100] using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 FastShuffle SSE4.2 AVX
  
  [libx264 @ 0xc2b100] profile Main, level 5.1
  
  [libx264 @ 0xc2b100] 264 - core 120 r2151 a3f4407 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2011 - http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=3 deblock=1:0:0 analyse=0x1:0x111 me=hex subme=7 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.00 mixed_ref=0 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=1 8x8dct=0 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=-2 threads=3 sliced_threads=0 nr=0 decimate=1 interlaced=0 bluray_compat=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=0 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=1 weightb=0 open_gop=1 weightp=2 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40 intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=40 rc=crf mbtree=1 crf=23.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=0 qpmax=69 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.25 aq=1:1.00
  
  Output #0, mp4, to '/var/www/dev_jackpine/ottawa2017/spinnies/test.mp4':
  
    Metadata:
  
      major_brand     : isom
  
      minor_version   : 0
  
      compatible_brands: isom3gp4
  
      creation_time   : 2015-09-04 15:08:21
  
      encoder         : Lavf53.21.1
  
      Stream #0.0(eng): Video: libx264, yuv420p, 480x640, q=-1--1, 180k tbn, 90k tbc
  
      Metadata:
  
        creation_time   : 2015-09-04 15:08:21
  
      Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: libvo_aacenc, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 200 kb/s
  
      Metadata:
  
        creation_time   : 2015-09-04 15:08:21
  
  Stream mapping:
  
    Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (h264 -> libx264)
  
    Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (aac -> libvo_aacenc)
  
  Press ctrl-c to stop encoding

  Here’s an example frame output :

  frame=124398 fps=142 q=33.0 size=   16885kB time=1.38 bitrate=100110.2kbits/s dup=124356 drop=0

  I’ve had the process running the whole time I’ve been writing this question, and so far it’s done... 22 frames.

  What could be the problem ?