Re: [video-codec] VP9 and HEVC compression challenges @ PCS 2013

This is a very interesting approach toward advancing video coding
technology.  One question I have is under what licensing conditions will
contributions be made?  The main concern, of course, would be that
someone would submit a technique that someone might claim is patented. 
Are any conditions being laid in place to protect contributions from
such a problem?  While I am not sure about the final licensing situation
of HEVC, at least VP9 is likely to be intended to be ultimately released
under a free software license, and we know the kinds of troubles that
issues surrounding software patents have caused in the past toward
adoption of technologies that would otherwise be considered free software.

In all honesty, even large corporations struggle with this problems, so
I wonder how a competition such as this can avoid this problem.  The
reason I mention this is, as stated above, any contribution or
modification to the reference encoder for VP9 will likely not be adopted
lest it be quite clear from known patent risks.

To put it bluntly, this kind of a competition, in the current legal and
patent climate, has a smell about it that seems like it will do less to
advance free/libre causes and be more advantageous to existing
stakeholders, as the deck is stacked in their favor.  Protections
addressing some of the previously-raised concerns might alleviate that
somewhat.

On 02/07/2013 12:58 PM, Axel Becker wrote:
> g'day everybody, how are you today? 
>
> we are writing you on behalf of the Picture Coding Symposium
> organizing committee as we believe that this group has a lot to offer
> to the video coding community. 
>
> the Picture Coding Symposium has been a very successful platform for
> compression researchers from academia and industry for many years.
> facilitating and enabling 
> technical dialogs and discussions and information exchange is very
> important to us. 
>
> for this year, with sponsorships from google and microsoft, we have
> put together two compression challenges: one compression challenge
> will be based 
> on the VP9 codec (we already have a special branch called pcs-2013)
> and one compression challenge will be HEVC based. in each competition
> we will 
> award a total of U$10000. 
>
> in each competition we have two subcategories: optimizations (encoder
> modifications only) and new tools (both encoder and decoder
> modifications). participants 
> can of course decide where they want to participate - or submit a
> technology to both codec frameworks - if it works in both. 
>
> if you are interested, please, have a look at http://pcs2013.org
> <http://pcs2013.org/> where you can find much more information. also
> note, that the Picture Coding Symposium 2013 has a 
> linkedin
> group http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Picture-Coding-Symposium-2013-4838120?gid=4838120&mostPopular=&trk=tyah
> and we will of course provide updates in the months to come. 
>
> only so much for today, we hope you are interested and that we get to
> meet many of you in person at the conference! 
>
> nice rgds, axel becker-lakus and antonio ortega
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> video-codec mailing list
> video-codec@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec

-- 
Libre Video
http://librevideo.org