Consider the patents held by MPEG LA (MPEG codecs, Firewire, H.264, etc.) These patents represent years of R&D work by their member companies and describe inventions that are non-frivolous. Surely these companies deserve some kind of protection for their work to encourage them to continue to invest in such research and publish it.
Let's take the case of H.264. Why is copyright not sufficient enough to protect their innovations to whatever degree of protection they choose (using licenses like GPL, MIT, or whatever they choose)?
The problem is there isn't just a patent on H.264 there are hundreds of patents on various aspects of it. This isn't done to protect the years of R&D it is done to create a patent minefield for any future competitors.
They don't let other more well understood industries operate in this way. Ford can't patent round rubber tires, hydraulic power steering, and using friction for braking. Good luck making a car now, but this is exactly the challenge a next-gen video codec would face.
> Let's take the case of H.264. Why is copyright not sufficient enough to protect their innovations to whatever degree of protection they choose (using licenses like GPL, MIT, or whatever they choose)?
Someone "skilled in the art" can take the descriptions of H.264 and produce a coder and a decoder without copying anything. Since there's no copying, copyright protection doesn't come into play.
Given that, how are they going to "protect their innovations"? Are you suggesting that they keep the description as a trade secret and allow access only under license? (They can't publish and say "you can't use this description unless you pay us money" - copyright doesn't work that way.)
Someone "skilled in the art" can take the descriptions of H.264 and produce a coder and a decoder without copying anything.
Isn't this exactly the same way people get around patents now? If I patent a Jack in the Box made using a spring and a box you could come along and make one using compressed air and a box.
The amount of protection H.264 would receive is directly related to how broadly derivative work is applied. Even at its broadest interpretation and everything that decoded or encode H.264 had to be licensed from them, at least it wouldn't stop other encodings from using almost all modern strategies to video encoding.
> Isn't this exactly the same way people get around patents now?
No, but the confusion comes from my ambiguous use of "copy".
Patents cover the use of mechanism X to accomplish purpose Y. Copying, for copyright purposes, is copying bytes (ignoring the whole look and feel thing). It's reasonably easy to use software mechanism X to accomplish purpose Y without copying bytes.
You seem to think that purpose should be limited to "H.264". If, for the purposes of argument, the relevant mechanism actually is useful for many other kinds of video encoding, it's unclear why that limitation makes sense. If the mechamism is worthy of protection for one protocol, why should it be unprotected when used in another?
Note that protocol ownership is different from mechanism ownership. The former is more akin to trademark, as in "real H.264" as opposed to some knockoff. (Coke vs Pepsi as it were.)
Let's take the case of H.264. Why is copyright not sufficient enough to protect their innovations to whatever degree of protection they choose (using licenses like GPL, MIT, or whatever they choose)?
The problem is there isn't just a patent on H.264 there are hundreds of patents on various aspects of it. This isn't done to protect the years of R&D it is done to create a patent minefield for any future competitors.
They don't let other more well understood industries operate in this way. Ford can't patent round rubber tires, hydraulic power steering, and using friction for braking. Good luck making a car now, but this is exactly the challenge a next-gen video codec would face.