Court orders Acer and Asus to stop selling PCs in Germany over H.265 patents

I haven't dug into the case or the ruling, but this looks like an incorrect court decision and probably an extortion racket. The problem is that, in the supply chain that ends in a completed PC, the system integrator (Acer/Asus) is not the place where video codecs come into the picture. There may be patent-infringing H265 decoding hardware inside the GPU, but Acer and Asus would have purchased GPUs as a standard component. There may be infringing H265 decoding software in the operating system, but again, they would have purchased that as a standard component.

And, realistically, I don't think anyone actually wants patent-encumbered video codecs; we're just stuck with them because bad patent law has allowed companies to have a monopoly over math, hurting the quality of unencumbered codecs, and because the patented codecs have wormed their way into standards so that they're required for interoperability.

So a near-Non Practicing Entity is enforcing standards-essential software patents in a European court, under arguably unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory terms.

That's a lot of things the European Patent system is supposed to prevent, and exposes quite a number of loopholes.

> Munich court

This court is famous for being a racket. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264

It’s such a shame as h265 is such an amazing codec breakthrough. I’m in the process of converting my library for space saving and the h265 files are literally 50% of the original size (give or take), with imperceptible quality difference. I can reencode around 100-200GB/day typically, using a 3090

Hopefully at some point we can agree that communication standards should not be patentable. (And this includes file systems and font typefaces).

Truly the worst codec, legally speaking. Cannot believe we're still fighting these things. I've never seen anybody have any such issues with H.264, AV1, VP9, or any of the older ones. Just like HDMI woes it's a shame that the heavily regulated standards won out over more open or fully open.