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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

• Concat two mp4 files with ffmpeg without losing quality [migrated]

  13 juin 2013, par jenia

  i have now a problem with concatenating of 2 videos using ffmpeg.
  So, i am encoding the source mp4 files to ts with

     ffmpeg -i output1.mp4 -scodec copy -vbsf h264_mp4toannexb i0.ts

  but the file i get looks much worse, then the source file.

  here is the information about both the files

     Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'output1.mp4':
  
     Metadata:
  
     major_brand     : isom
  
     minor_version   : 1
  
     compatible_brands: isom
  
     creation_time   : 2013-06-13 15:40:36
  
     Duration: 00:00:15.72, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 2053 kb/s
  
     Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264 (High), yuv420p, 1280x720, 1931 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr,   12800 tbn, 50 tbc
  
     Stream #0.1(und): Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 128 kb/s
  
  
  
    Input #0, mpegts, from 'i0.ts':
  
    Duration: 00:00:15.64, start: 1.400000, bitrate: 1382 kb/s
  
    Program 1 
  
    Metadata:
  
    service_name    : Service01
  
    service_provider: Libav
  
    Stream #0.0[0x100]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 1280x720 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 104857 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
  
    Stream #0.1[0x101](und): Audio: mp2, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 128 kb/s

  So, how can i solve this problem ?
  Thanks in advance !

• Making Sure The PNG Gets There

  14 juin 2013, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Rewind to 1999. I was developing an HTTP-based remote management interface for an embedded device. The device sat on an ethernet LAN and you could point a web browser at it. The pitch was to transmit an image of the device’s touch screen and the user could click on the picture to interact with the device. So we needed an image format. If you were computing at the time, you know that the web was insufferably limited back then. Our choice basically came down to GIF and JPEG. Being the office’s annoying free software zealot, I was championing a little known up and coming format named PNG.

  So the challenge was to create our own PNG encoder (incorporating a library like libpng wasn’t an option for this platform). I seem to remember being annoyed at having to implement an integrity check (CRC) for the PNG encoder. It’s part of the PNG spec, after all. It just seemed so redundant. At the time, I reasoned that there were 5 layers of integrity validation in play.

  I don’t know why, but I was reflecting on this episode recently and decided to revisit it. Here are all the encapsulation layers of a PNG file when flung over an ethernet network :

  
  
  

  So there are up to 5 encapsulations for the data in this situation. At the innermost level is the image data which is compressed with the zlib DEFLATE method. At first, I thought that this also had a CRC or checksum. However, in researching this post, I couldn’t find any evidence of such an integrity check. Further, I don’t think we bothered to compress the PNG data in this project long ago. It was a small image, monochrome, and transferring via LAN, so the encoder could get away with signaling uncompressed data.

  The graphical data gets wrapped up in a PNG chunk and all PNG chunks have a CRC. To transmit via the network, it goes into a TCP frame, which also has a checksum. That goes into an IP packet. I previously believed that this represented another integrity check. While an IP frame does have a checksum, the checksum only covers the IP header and not the payload. So that doesn’t really count towards this goal.

  Finally, the data gets encapsulated into an ethernet frame which has — you guessed it — a CRC.

  I see that other link layer protocols like PPP and wireless ethernet (802.11) also feature frame CRCs. So I guess what I’m saying is that, if you transfer a PNG file over the network, you can be confident that the data will be free of any errors.