Paper in the 21st Century...

Today's paper is probably not paper at all - but an LCD display.  My guess is that if you multiplied the minutes people spend focusing their eyes on paper versus the time spend on LCD displays world wide LCD displays would win hands down.

But today's paper isn't as simple as the paper of yesteryear.  In the olden days paper came in reams of nice, bright white sheets.  No one knew or cared how the paper got that way.  It was just assumed to have been manufactured that way by the vendor.  Whatever patents or intellectual property that was involved in the manufacturing of the paper was as opaque as the paper itself.  While, if you were in the industry, you might have imagined some legal battles over techniques and processes to create the paper it certainly never touched the "lunch box joe" reading things on it.

Similarly for type.  Typesetting, the means for marking the paper, was also largely free of direct intellectual property issues.  Certainly the machines that made type, like the one I fondly recall in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in the 1970's, were subject to such issues, but not the type itself (perhaps save for fonts) nor the traditional production processes.

But today's paper is a much different story.

Today's paper is not inert because behind it is a computer.  I know that I, even in this business, really don't think much about how what I am seeing on the display actually got there.  I just think about it as if it were paper for the most part.  Of course I can zoom and scroll, but from a work perspective, I am just reading.

(For example, I am involved in a large, complex iOS (iPhone)/Mac OSX software development project.  The amount of manuals, diagrams, documents, tutorials, samples, and so on is mind numbing.  I spend a lot of time each staring at my paper screen.)

However, very much unlike paper the content that appears on my "paper" each day may not, like paper and type of old, be unencumbered.

What do I mean by unencumbered?

Well, from an intellectual property standpoint something like an image (for example the one at the top of this post) requires that the computer behind the paper process it.  This processing may involve some sort of intellectual property owned by someone besides me.  However, since I am using the process to view the image I could become obligated to the owner of that intellectual property for some sort of payment or fee.  So, if my use of such a process, whether known or unknown to me, causes obligation to me we can say the use of that process encumbers me.

A real world example of this is the patents involving JPEG image compression.  Toward the end of the life of these patents (mid 2000's) a patent troll whipped up claims against anyone they could find and demanded payment for use of their intellectual property.  Apparently they collected some hefty payments.

As time rolls on more and more complex software elements are required to drive what you see on your paper screen each day.  Static images such as JPEGs are old news.  Today's hot intellectual property issues involve video codecs.

A video codec is a piece of software that decodes a compressed videos stream from a web server so that it can be displayed on your screen.  Without video codecs on-screen video (whether for computers, satellite or cable) wouldn't be practical (the files would simply be too large).  Companies spend millions of dollars developing these codecs to gain competitive advantages in the market place.

The problem is that to make something like YouTube even possible it is necessary for everyone that wishes to view the videos to have the right codec installed on their computer.

Initially codecs where few and far between - mostly being installed in expensive professional video equipment.  But as the web expanded codecs were developed to install into web browsers as plug-ins.

The problem today is that in the intervening decades thousands of video codec related patents have been issued.  This plethora of patents makes it increasingly difficult to determine if a browser plug-in that can process video is encumbered by a patent owner in some way.  (The reason for this is that the patent office does not make a determination as to who or what else might using a particular patent it grants.  That is left up to the market place.  Since it can take years to be granted a patent often some other company will be making use of a patented process without knowing it.  Then, once the patent is issued, they become violators.)

So today this issue has boiled down to one of who can create the most unencumbered codecs.  No one, not even Google and Microsoft, want to be blind-sided by lawsuits from patent holders claiming that they are responsible for violating a patent.

Unfortunately for us, though, companies like Google are not being fully honest about this.  At issues is the notion of "open source" codec.  Google likes to be open and to use "open source" technology - that is, technology that does not require Google to pay royalties.  However, just because software is "open source" does not mean that it is free of potential patent violations.

So Google, in the light of wanting the codecs to be based on community work, i.e., open source, is trying to steer developers and users to the WebM and Theora codecs.  Google is also casting out codecs that use H.264 from its Chrome project as tainted or potentially encumbered. However, while doing this, Google is not claiming that its opensource codecs will require users to pay "no royalties" but merely that there are no "known royalty issues" with their new codecs (see this).

Microsoft, sensing that Google is busy trying to push the liability of any potential patent infringement for these codecs onto unsuspecting developers and users has gallantly asked Google to legally indemnify anyone making use of this technology.  While I suspect that Microsoft's interest here is probably not altruistic I still believe they are correct.

Google is again working the system to foist off on others what it should be taking responsibility for.  While it might seem wonderful and altruistic to want the web full of "open standards" a careful reading of the situation exposes the truth.  Namely that Google, through slight of hand, is foisting all future potential liability off on us, the unsuspecting public.