Court orders Acer and Asus to stop selling PCs in Germany over H.265 patents

Court orders Acer and Asus to stop selling PCs in Germany over H.265 patents(videocardz.com)

79 points by ledoge 92 days ago | 32 comments

jimrandomh 92 days ago |

I haven't dug into the case or the ruling, but this looks like an incorrect court decision and probably an extortion racket. The problem is that, in the supply chain that ends in a completed PC, the system integrator (Acer/Asus) is not the place where video codecs come into the picture. There may be patent-infringing H265 decoding hardware inside the GPU, but Acer and Asus would have purchased GPUs as a standard component. There may be infringing H265 decoding software in the operating system, but again, they would have purchased that as a standard component.

And, realistically, I don't think anyone actually wants patent-encumbered video codecs; we're just stuck with them because bad patent law has allowed companies to have a monopoly over math, hurting the quality of unencumbered codecs, and because the patented codecs have wormed their way into standards so that they're required for interoperability.

CharlesW 92 days ago | |

> There may be patent-infringing H265 decoding hardware inside the GPU, but Acer and Asus would have purchased GPUs as a standard component.

It doesn't generally work like that, at least for codec patent pools. The royalty trigger is typically tied to the sale of a "consumer HEVC product" to an end user, and the "licensee" is generally the entity that sells the finished, branded product (e.g., the PC OEM), even if the silicon came from someone else. (I have a patent related to deferring royalty triggers for technologies like HEVC until they're needed: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11930011B2/)

josephg 92 days ago | |

As I understand it, this is a pretty common legal problem that shows up when multiple parties collaborate to make something. And the result turns out to be legally problematic in some way. Its often incredibly difficult for the plaintiff to figure out who's really legally responsible - especially since they don't have access to all the supplier contracts that were signed. And all the suppliers will probably blame each other in court.

Looking at this case, if we assume there is infringing software / hardware inside these laptops, then figuring out which supplier is to blame is Acer/asus's problem. Its not up to nokia to go through all the contracts.

Its kinda like in software. If I install your software and it crashes, don't blame your 3rd party libraries. I don't care why it crashes. Figure it out and fix it.

Philosophically, I completely agree with you about software patents. I don't even mind these legal battles because they push companies toward the patent-free AV1 codec.

impossiblefork 92 days ago | |

It doesn't matter where codecs come into the picture. If they're selling something which infringes the patent, they're selling something which infringes that patent. It doesn't matter if they bought the part that actually does the infringing bit from someone else.

intunderflow 92 days ago |

> Munich court

This court is famous for being a racket. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264

hermanzegerman 91 days ago | |

Then you haven't heard yet about the Courts of Cologne and Hamburg.

They are quite famous for creative bullshit rulings with regards to copyright, DRM and other digital stuff they pretend to not understand.

Like "Adblockers are illegal because they bypass DRM"

arianvanp 92 days ago | |

Munich court is terrible. A disgrace to democracy. They also allow terrorizing of citizens for "copyright infringement" through siding with Movie industry. All ISPs just hand over your personal data to these copyright trolls no questions asked. They literally surveil everyone's Internet unchecked to extort people for money

Rochus 91 days ago | | |

> A disgrace to democracy

Like so many current trends in Germany and Europe. But the US is not better when it comes to IP rights and rulings. There is so much misuse of patent- and copyright and the legislature simply allows this to happen. That's what I would call government failure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_failure).

amelius 92 days ago |

Hopefully at some point we can agree that communication standards should not be patentable. (And this includes file systems and font typefaces).

Kim_Bruning 92 days ago |

So a near-Non Practicing Entity is enforcing standards-essential software patents in a European court, under arguably unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory terms.

That's a lot of things the European Patent system is supposed to prevent, and exposes quite a number of loopholes.

zokier 92 days ago | |

> arguably unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory terms

I'll bite. How do you argue that?

Kim_Bruning 91 days ago | | |

We're taking the rest of my statement as accurate then? O:-)

Fine, so in addition to the fact that this whole action SHOULD be prima facie illegal in Europe; for the FRAND part (which is -to be fair- the weaker part of my argument, because this shouldn't be happening in the first place) :

* Forum shopping in Munich is at least somewhat unfair

* Implementors went $0.03, Uk court set interim rate of $0.365, now nokia is going for $0.69? We can argue unreasonable [1][3]

* Hisense settled at undisclosed terms, Acer and Asus were injuncted, so that counts towards discriminatory [2]

[1] https://www.juve-patent.com/cases/us-firms-secure-asian-impl...

[2] https://www.juve-patent.com/cases/hisense-settles-global-dis...

[3] https://ipfray.com/munich-i-regional-court-enjoins-computer-...

Neywiny 92 days ago |

Truly the worst codec, legally speaking. Cannot believe we're still fighting these things. I've never seen anybody have any such issues with H.264, AV1, VP9, or any of the older ones. Just like HDMI woes it's a shame that the heavily regulated standards won out over more open or fully open.

josephg 92 days ago | |

H264 is controlled by the same consortium as H265. The only difference is that many of the h264 patents have expired over the last couple of years.

The free version of davinci resolve still doesn't include h264 support - presumably because they don't want to poke the bear. (h264 still works on macos because apple pays the licensing fees, and resolve uses the macos encoder & decoder.)

expedition32 91 days ago | | |

Yeah when I'm paying Nvidia 1500 eurodollars for a GPU I expect Nvidia to fork over a few cents to these industry clowns.

Asus just has to pay up.

sam1714 92 days ago | |

Lucent v. Microsoft, $1.53 billion over MP3

Our_Benefactors 92 days ago |

It’s such a shame as h265 is such an amazing codec breakthrough. I’m in the process of converting my library for space saving and the h265 files are literally 50% of the original size (give or take), with imperceptible quality difference. I can reencode around 100-200GB/day typically, using a 3090

digiown 91 days ago | |

I really suggest not using GPU encodes for this purpose unless it's mostly worthless archival content. You can save way more space using AV1 on CPU via things like av1an. If you really like H265 using it on CPU also gets much better quality/size tradeoff.

Our_Benefactors 91 days ago | | |

The encoding speed with my CPU was less than real time. This was unacceptable performance to me.

Maybe my CPU settings weren't right?

jackvalentine 92 days ago | |

Assuming you’re using FFMPEG?

Do you have a good guide for balancing quality and size? I’ve searched but never found something that really nails it for me. I have until now just been keeping everything as it streamed off the dvd or bluray in mpeg4 or h264 in an mkv and yeah, time to re-encode in to something more reasonably sized.

Our_Benefactors 91 days ago | | |

Yes, I wrote a python script that uses FFMPEG and detects the bitrate of the file and determines approximately what CQ to use. If the original file has a low bitrate, by reencoding it with a high CQ you can actually increase the file size (lol).

Normal CQ = 28 Aggressive CQ = 34

  # Thresholds to detect ultra-low-bitrate inputs (use more aggressive encoding)
  # (width, height) → min sensible bitrate (bps). If stream <= threshold, use aggressive profile.  

 LOW_BITRATE_THRESHOLDS = [
       ((3840, 2160),  13_000_000),  # 4K  ≤13 Mbps → use aggressive encoding
       ((2560, 1440),   8_000_000),  # 1440p
       ((1920, 1080),   5_000_000),  # 1080p
       ((1280, 720),    2_500_000),  # 720p
       ((854, 480),     1_200_000),  # 480p
   ]

josephg 91 days ago | |

Do you notice a difference if you encode using your GPU vs CPU? I've heard people say NVENC doesn't encode as efficiently as x265 but I haven't actually tried it out.

NVENC can obviously encode much faster, but for archive I'd probably prefer a better compression ratio if thats on the cards.

fancyfredbot 92 days ago |

I have a feeling the days of patent encumbered video codecs will come to an end soon and be replaced with some kind of autoencoder, or at least the decoder part. It should be possible to match or exceed the compression achieved by H.265, although the decoder would probably consume more energy and cost more. The cool thing about autoencoder compression is that at high compression rates it'll still look like a high resolution image, it'll just be of the wrong scene!

hulitu 91 days ago | |

> I have a feeling the days of patent encumbered video codecs will come to an end soon

I have a feeling that the reason we get a new codec every couple of years is: money.

digiown 91 days ago |

Meanwhile, over the border in France, software patents aren't a thing. That's why VLC gets to ignore it, by the way.

hulitu 91 days ago | |

Ursula will take care of it.

conartist6 91 days ago |

https://xkcd.com/1271/

# Thresholds to detect ultra-low-bitrate inputs (use more aggressive encoding) # (width, height) → min sensible bitrate (bps). If stream <= threshold, use aggressive profile. LOW_BITRATE_THRESHOLDS = [ ((3840, 2160), 13_000_000), # 4K ≤13 Mbps → use aggressive encoding ((2560, 1440), 8_000_000), # 1440p ((1920, 1080), 5_000_000), # 1080p ((1280, 720), 2_500_000), # 720p ((854, 480), 1_200_000), # 480p ]