memes

Is it still a meme when you feel it in your soul?

I don't know why, maybe because it's Sunday morning and I'm just drinking my coffee and browsing around while the rest of the house sleeps in, but this triggered a rabbit hole for me. I already have a lil plugin just for quickly saving direct to PNG or JPG when I right click a WebP in my browsers, but I SHOULDN'T GODDAMN HAVE TO.

WEBP as a wrapper (as coupled along with AVIF/AV1/VP8/etc) seems all about reassertion of corporate control of web file formats by pivoting codecs back toward patent encumbrance as a control factor, just without universal royalty hooks attached to anyone that touches even free and open software utilizing it. We were actually FREE of that bullshit for a short time. PNG has no patent encumbrance. GIF, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 all have expired patents and can be used freely.

[Don't get me wrong, MPEG as an org was and is pure corruption and greed, and MPEG-4 Part 2 adoption was fully diminished outside of 'free' circles based on their stated intention to apply a 'content fee' to the royalty requirements. It's obvious why VP8 -> AV1 had to happen one way or another to break their royalty cabal insanity, but it still doesn't taste good at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2 ]

The consortium of companies behind WebP and AV1 are all taking part in the enshittification of the entire technology sector, from web sites and web apps, operating systems, and application ecosystems. Why would we ever trust them to not rug pull the 'irrevocable but revocable' patent license scheme? They only put it together in the first place to end run having to pay someone who was 'not them' any royalties for image/video/audio encoding.

References:

WEBP is patent encumbered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP

https://github.com/ImageMagick/webp/blob/main/PATENTS

Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free,** irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license** to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of these implementations of WebM, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by these implementations of WebM. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.

GIF is not patent encumbered since 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

In 2004, all patents relating to the proprietary compression used for GIF expired.

PNG was never patent encumbered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG

PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)—unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym "PNG's not GIF".

AV1, VP8, VP9, and other modernized "open source" or "free" Video Codecs all appear to be patent encumbered.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23747923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8