
RMS on the Ogg Vorbis license (2001) - d99kris
http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
======
krylon
It is interesting that 15 years later, with Ogg Vorbis not only providing
better audio quality at a given bitrate, and Opus apparently even better, MP3
is still abundant.

I was especially annoyed when I still had an iPod, because substantial parts
of my music library are in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which Apple could
support without paying a single cent in licensing, yet iPod - at least a
couple of years back - only supported MP3 and AAC. :-|

I would assume the patents on MP3 have expired by now, is anyone in a position
to confirm or deny this?

~~~
bydo
Vorbis and FLAC may be distributed under very permissive open-source licenses,
but they may also infringe on software patents, which is ostensibly why Apple
has avoided them. They also may not, but under the current US patent system we
can't really know until a court case; it does make sense for Apple (or any
other company trying to avoid paying huge sums to patent trolls) not to test
these waters. Licensing AAC and MP3 from Fraunhofer was an easy way to pass
the buck.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Licensing AAC and MP3 from Fraunhofer was an easy way to pass the buck.

Not really. Someone else could pop up and claim to have a patent over AAC or
MP3, just as easily as they could for any other codec. Licensing a patent from
one party makes absolutely no guarantee that someone else couldn't pop up with
another patent and either payment or destroy a product. And I seriously doubt
that a patent license for AAC or MP3 came with indemnity against any third-
party patent claim.

~~~
CamperBob2
_Not really. Someone else could pop up and claim to have a patent over AAC or
MP3, just as easily as they could for any other codec._

And in fact, that's exactly what happened:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-
Lucent_v._Microsoft_Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-
Lucent_v._Microsoft_Corp%2e)

A $1.5 billion jury verdict was handed down against Microsoft, which was
overturned by the judge.

------
epistasis
MP3 seems to be one of the cases where patents seem to have not hindered the
spread of information. The inventor made a small amount of money, and decodes
and encoders proliferated. MP3 dominated music. And there's no shortage of
open source (which, I know, is not what RMS wants) code available.

This is not the catastrophic situation that I was told to expect from
patentable file formats.

~~~
simula67
From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and_legislation)

"MP3 license revenues generated about €100 million for the Fraunhofer Society
in 2005."

Is that small amount of money ?

~~~
dingo_bat
Compared to the value of the music/audio distributed through mp3? I'd say
that's a pittance.

------
Hydraulix989
I think the situation in the second to last paragraph is now the usual case,
not the exceptional case, as defensibility in today's market has shifted from
technical feats to network effects.

