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xiphmontAh, a new bit of codec industry drama.
Jarek Duda has accused Google of patenting his entropy coding invention (rANS) out from under him after he offered it for inclusion in the upcoming AV1 codec.
Facts as far as anyone in the Reddit thread knows them: Jarek is inventor of rANS (well, sort of, it's been independently invented at least a few times), and Google has indeed filed an ANS-related patent (USPTO Applicaton #20170164007).
I'm not going to defend Google here, because they need to learn the hard way that optics matter, and that 'don't be evil' counts for individuals and not just markets. One big 'attaboy' doesn't make up for ten little 'fuck you's. They needed to at least mention this to Jarek.
So, Google: If anyone above middle manager is reading this, reach out to Jarek. Even if all you have to say is indeed 'fuck you' and he deserves it, at least say directly to his face.
Now.... All that said, Jarek needs to calm the fuck down.
Addressing his first complaint, the Daala and AV1 developers haven't ignored him or rANS, but the performance claims just don't hold up, and it has to code everything in reverse. The latter especially is a technical showstopper.
I've bookmarked a number of public threads on rANS from the Daala and AV1 development lists here, here, and here. Discussion mostly stopped only after DAALA_EC was adopted over rANS by the AV1 codec working group.
But Jarek's real objection is Google's patent application. From his thread on encode.ru:
... and now I have accidentally found out about this outrageous patent application - literally of my help ...If they would talk with me about it, formulated it not to scare others from using ANS (the current is), that it is somehow beneficial for AV1 patent pool and guarantee that it will indeed get there (now we can only hope) ... I might even help them with that.
He point outs earlier in the thread that there are other pending ANS-related patent applications from groups that are not Google.
As for Google's filing, it looks pretty damned specific to AV1 at first read (IANAL). Google would be blithering idiots not to be filing defensive patents that look exactly like that.
So my action item for Jarek is: Raise awareness sure, but don't burn any bridges yet. Find a friend with a big bag of weed, and take a few days off.
