Acer und ASUS dürfen in Deutschland nach dem Nokia HEVC-Videocodec-Patenturteil nun keine PCs und Laptops mehr verkaufen

As a european you can’t trust europeans in power to do the right thing. Did we need american-imitating bullshit software patent madness here in Europe years later? No of course not.

Abolish intellectual monopoly law.

What does this mean? What patent ruling?

Video Codec licensing has been one of the biggest plagues in the tech scene. It’s responsible for a lot of at worst straight out predatory practices and at best moderate inconveniences.

H265/HEVC has been even more problematic to adopt that H264/AVC/MPEG4 because of the ridiculousness of licensing issues surrounding them, it doesn’t help that the patent holders are squeezing consumers more and more while adding nothing new to the table.

This year, the cost of H265 went up and more and more manufacturers are seriously considering dropping support on top HP and Dell who earlier committed to dropping support.

Earlier Synology dropped HEVC support citing licensing issues, which is insane given an overwhelming majority of their customer base relied on it.

This is Nokia grasping onto the last straws it can before AV1 takes over, the transition is going to be rough but the sooner we can get away from patented codecs the better we’ll be.

While we’re at it, we should get rid of HDMI and the HDMI forum too.