The last bits of MP3 patents expired some time last November and some distributions are already picking it up for...

What the fuck am I reading.
Patents are a useless money sink that sucks financing from a project and is only good to make a buck by suing. The single biggest problem is that you can get sued even if you weren't aware of the patent you're infriging, so you can't ever make sure you've ever cleared all hurdles. Lawyers know licenses are not very effective, so people are adviced to actually avoid searching for patents themselves to avoid paying triple damages in case of a trial. Business often also insist on acquiring patents as protection, mainly for protection from lawsuits and for suing. 'Protecting' invention takes a backseat to those two.

Then there's patent offices granting retardedly obvious and unoriginal patents (say, a patent for curved edges), and inventors patenting an invention that's useless by itself and meant to work in combination with another that's kept secret (though this is supposedly illegal, I think).

Patents also raise the barrier to entry for making anything tremendously and aid established businesses in keeping new competitors down with patent thickets.

Software patents are probably one of the most flagrant examples, as they hinder the adoption of standards, and prohibit people from implementing features that resemble anything in a patent. They're probably on the same level of retardation as copyright on APIs.q

You've got to be seriously retarded if you think patents are anything but detrimental to society. Just seeing Monsanto suing farmers for planting seeds from their own crops should have made you realize.

The formats H.264 and H.265 themselves are protected by the patent. You can use them freely if you earn no money from it, if I recall correctly.
x264 and x265 are just (en/de)coders made by VideoLAN and MulticoreWare respectively. There are proprietary (en/de)coders available too. Same goes for MP3 and LAME.

iThings dropped MP3 long time ago. They use Apple Lossless Audio Codec (.m4a). They still support convertion between the too, but the music that is being sold on iTunes goes in ALAC.

really?
why I only ever see lossy AAC?

I might be wrong, I guess. Haven't touched anything made by Apple in my life.

You're retarded if you think patents are useless.
You're confusing the 2017 practical issues related to patents - issues stemming from greed and jewishness - with the 1800s theoretical concept of patents.

Patents in essence and by themselves are a good and necessary thing. If you cant patent the thing you're working on until you finish it, nobody's going to work on anything.
Would YOU work on a cold fusion engine for 10 years, only to have someone steal it from you and claim it as their own, and for you to make 0 money out of it?
Most people wouldnt, lunatics and idiots aside.

That doesnt mean that everything everywhere should be patented for 120+ years and that you should sue everybody whose work bears the slightest resemblance to your patent. But the practical financial and legal reality of today is a completely different matter from the ideal implementation of patents.

That's a tall order, can you back up this claim?

Copyright is 120 years now, patents are nowhere near that long. Software patents are absolute fucking cancer in any shape and form.

Being Bill Gates and all, of course you'd think that.
I, too, would like to work on a project then license half of it as my own and start making mad $$$ based on somebody else's work.

Opus is transform based so it fucks up transients no matter what bitrate. although not everyone can hear it, and not music actually contains problematic sounds.
Musepack doesn't do it (it only splits signal into subbands which is reversible and then quantizes and encodes that shit) so it can come as close to source as needed, if given enough bits. (by default it works in VBR and takes about 160-200kbps)

quickfix

I don't believe this. The claim "Nobody will ever work on anything if there were no patents" is lunatic by itself. Besides, today being an individual with a patent means nothing, since you need funding for that, and in most cases ends up in the hands of a big company, which is pretty much the same thing with the ONLY difference that the original author has guaranteed money (If any), and the idea gets locked inside a greedy company. That's egoistic thinking that shows an obvious problem: "You came first, you deserve a lifetime of it". If a bunch of people all over the world came up with the same concept, most likely because the idea it's pretty much obvious given the context and it's needed today, nobody can't do anything except the first one. Yay for pushing back progress 20 years because of what some autistic individual on the internet thinks.
You think caring about the individual person is being anti-jew when it's pretty much the opposite, with patents there is no competition in implementation, the companies can fish the patents and lock everyone else out. Besides if you worked on a cold fusion engine for 10 years, it's most likely you are the most famous person in the planet earth and people throw you money wherever you go.

Just let MP3 die already! Opus offers much better lossy compression without sacrificing disk space!

Musepack was better in practice, but is thoroughly beaten by Opus and good (revent libvorbis) Vorbis encoders. Source: my ass. I've usd mpc for some time.

SO many non-arguments...where do I even start with you commiekike shills?

what
not an argument

yeah, no, it isn't, see the example about a cold fusion engine
if you would spend 20 years of your life working on a cold fusion engine only to be rewarded with absolutely nothing, then you're either a lunatic or an idiot. people NEED to be able to protect themselves from thieves and abusers and they NEED a guarantee for their rewards

but you can feel free to work as an unpaid volunteer for free and open source software in your free time, together with 20 other poorfag autists from around the world, for no monetary reward whatsoever. you could be the next tesla! nobody will remember you while some eddison will be in every single physics textbook and a multi-millionaire in his lifetime
dailyoddsandends.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/how-nikola-tesla-threw-away-a-billion-dollar-fortune-then-died-penniless/

Yeah, I'm sure they would, just as people threw money at Tesla wherever he went for AC and for planet-wide wifi.

you're really retarded, re-read

Tesla threw away his money, it's his fault. This "No one would work on progress without a patent guarantee" is your inner jew talking, just saying. The recognition alone is enough for most people, and today that recognition will always come with success. These are different times gramps, your 100 year old laws are obsolete.

Patents are the enemy of the free market

you mean a temporary monopoly in exchange for disclosing your invention so that society can take advantage of it someday?
no, they're not. Thanks to patents you can be sued by patent trolls for infringing on a patent you've never seen in your life. Patents are being granted for extremely controversial things, like life forms and genes, with said patents greatly obstaculizing research and contradicting their intended original purpose (benefitting society). Moreover, patent thickets create steep barriers to entry, reducing competition, and sometimes even affecting consumers.

And if you try acquiring a license, the other party can just flat out refuse, because fuck you.

Anyone with two braincells is against plagiarism and agrees with the right to attribution. The problem is the above abuses, which are intrinsecal to the patent system.
Rewarding inventors and researchers for their efforts is desirable to encourage them, but I can't quite agree with the idea that people should expect money to rain on them magically if they make something. After all, the system is not there to fill your pockets; that's a side-effect of it. And technically you also benefit from the usefulness of your invention. And ironically enough, this system often makes present inventors' lives harder and puts them at odds with it.

This. The licensing party can refuse.

Actually, any form of intellectual property is cancer. Exercising your rights (i.e. suing) is so expensive 95% of people would go bankrupt in a lawsuit (or can you afford to a spare $500000 and a couple of years?). Trade secrets are probably the only area which makes the slightest bit of sense.

I assume you're talking about the US. It's 120 years from date of creation, for works whose author's death is unknown, unpublished works, or corporate works. Otherwise it's life+70 for authors, or 95 years from registration for corporations (if shorter than 120 from creation).

So did Vorbis got fixed that bug that caused everything below q=6 sound like ass?

What does it mean beaten, do you have ABX results for them to compare?