It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.

Indeed. I'm pretty sure the issue is that the HDMI Consortium wants some kind of royalty for each device sold with a proper HDMI designation, whereas VESA doesn't care if you sell one device or a million devices with DisplayPort. You owe them nothing extra beyond the initial legal access fee.

Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.

Another example of something that shouldn't be accepted as a standard. If you want to be a standard, then the spec must be published to the public. DUH.

It's sad what people put up with now.

> This fails even at the FRAND level because you're not "allowed" to implement it in open source software.

The same conditions apply to everyone: they do not discriminate—the ND in FRAND—open versus closed source. Everyone gets the same contract/NDA to sign.

If there was one contract/NDA for closed source, and another for open source, that would be discriminatory.

From the article:

> At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements.

I wonder on what basis. Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering?

> They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP".

The general premise of patents and copyrights is that you're going to do some development work and then you get an exclusive right that yields a competitive advantage.

Standards are different. The purpose of the standard is that Alice wants her output device to be compatible with everyone else's input device and Bob wants his input device to be compatible with everyone else's output device.

There is no competitive advantage to be had because the very premise is that everyone possible is going to implement it to maximize the network effect. And the entire industry has the incentive to want the standard to be good and put whatever good ideas they have into it because they're all stuck with it if it isn't. Meanwhile because of the network effect, everyone has to implement the standard because if they come up with their own thing -- even if it's better -- it wouldn't be compatible.

So all of the normal incentives from copyrights and patents are wrong. You can't gain a competitive advantage from it, companies have a preexisting incentive to make it good even without an exclusive right, and someone who doesn't want to pay doesn't have the option to try to do better on their own because of the network effect. And the network effect makes it an antitrust concern.

The result is that NDAs and royalties on standards are just a shakedown and the law shouldn't allow them.

> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.

This would only make sense if there _wasn't_ free video standards competing with HDMI. How is it that one group managed to do this for free yet the other group charges clearly exorbitant rates for a nearly equivalent product.

> They own IP.

That isn't nearly as valuable as they say it is. They only do this to prevent piracy and not to promote any useful technical standard.

> People want to use that IP.

People are _forced_ to because the same group practically gives away their technology under certain conditions so their connectors get added to nearly every extant device. I don't _want_ to use HDMI. I'm simply _forced_ to through market manipulation.

> want to make money.

Selling drugs would earn them more money. Why don't we tolerate that? It could be, under some torturous logic, be just another "standard business practice." In fact looking at our laws I see tons of "standard business practices" that are now flatly illegal.

The law is a tool. It can be changed. It should be changed. The citizens pay for 85% of it and while businesses only pay 7%. Why do their "standard practices" hold a candle to the "needs of the citizens."

Yes, and we should say "no more making money from stupid things like secret technical standards"

Copyright and patent protection is afforded under the principle that said protections grant concurrent value to the people as is granted to the holder of the rights. Stuff like HDMI specs gatekeeping simply allows a select group of people to exploit licensing and seek rent. It doesn't provide any benefit to the people of the US whatsoever, and the fundamental principle by which the rights were granted is violated.

Copyright and patent protection is intended to incentivize and reward creativity, not to allow conglomerates of IP hoarders and patent trolls to exploit legal gotchas, to allow endless rent seeking, or empower megacorps to mass file endless vague patents so as to provide endless legal challenges to small competitors.

Copyright and patent law as currently implemented and practiced are fundamentally broken and far diverged from any principled, meaningful benefit to the people.

There are what, 2 publishers now? Five nines of commercially viable patents go to megacorps and universities? Seven nines of all music and media belong to conglomerates of one sort or another? Something like that.

I understand the intent of the original implementations of copyright, and maybe the laws even made sense for a few years, but either they were corrupt from the start, or they were so badly written that they never had a shot at achieving any sort of meaningful ROI for the price paid by the public.

How much money could PCI SIG possibly be making for the rightsholders with those fees? They’re not charged to members, they’re not per-seat (so each company only needs to pay once even if they have 100 engineers that need to read it), and they don’t include patent licenses for shipping actual hardware. Nobody’s business model is threatened even slightly by making the standards public.

And as we saw with AV1 vs H.265, the IP encumbrance of multiparty standards can create barriers that kill their adoption and the corresponding ability for rightsholders to make money off them. It looks like that family of encodings is going to die off, with basically zero interest from anybody in licensing H.266 when you’ll be able to build AV2 software and hardware for free.

> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.

Are you sure that's what's in play here? I don't think anyone gives a shit about using HDMI. They want video and audio to work on their TV.

Now tell me how many TVs with non-HDMI ports are out there, and tell me with a straight face that it isn't due to pressure from the "consortium".

Edit: by the way the video signaling was identical between DVI and HDMI in the beginning. So whose hard work was it?

Anti competitive "standard business practices" should be counteracted with good enough competition law that forbids them. As simple as that. So I totally agree with the above comment. They simply shouldn't be able to prevent open implementations.

"Hard work" is the worst way to make money at scale, so that argument rings more than just a little hollow, especially when defending access control based moneymaking.

you are confusing standards with patents.

When I'm in these situations, I try and put myself into the IP holder's shoes.

"if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?"

I think the answer is probably no for most people.

Because most of us are not the IP holder, they think this technology should just be free (as you stated earlier).

This lack of empathy and care for others (even IP holders) is largely why these draconian IP rules and contracts exist. It's why there are whole crazy NDAs around the HDMI spec. It's because every time someone is given even a slight look under the covers, they try and steal it, because it's worth a lot of money.

This is a nuanced variant of "this is why we can't have nice things" all over again.

Your claim is weird.

No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard.

The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results.

If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents.

Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now.

The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own.

The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures.

In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.

> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular.

I don't get it. Why would making a standard freely accessible impede its adoption?

I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?

Bad example, the 3GPP standards are not at all closed like HDMI 2.1 is, unlike HDMI 2.1 there are open source implementations https://osmocom.org/projects

Are you referring to the 3GPP specifications that you, I or anyone else can go and read absolutely free of charge?

https://www.3gpp.org/

> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular.

What does a specification being paywalled vs open have to do 3G cellular existing or not?

That sounds wonderful. A world without widespread high bandwidth wireless connectivity would be a better world.