Bladeenc Under Patent Attack

Zane Johnson noted that bladeenc is having legal problems. He's taken the binaries down until legal problems surrounding some patents ... the source code however is still available... The bladeenc homepage also has a cool summary of the DeCSS story thats worth reading if you haven't.

There's other (better) encoders out there

I've tried Blade, LAME [sulaco.org], and GoGo [nifty.com], and I've found that Bladeenc produced both the lowest quality MP3s and was also the slowest. However, I feel that patent issues over the MP3 format may cause some to push for an open solution such as Ogg Vorbis [xiph.org] to our music compression needs. I hope that these issues can be settled though, I don't like to see people having their rights taken.

Don't use GIFs either.

So when are we going to get the PNG of the MP3 world? I can't believe how ridiculous companies are thinking that they can milk money out of near-standard formats like this. You think they would've learned from Unisys that people just won't go for stuff like this.

Is MP3 a standard???

From the first paragraph of the BladeEnc letter, it is written: Due to threats from large companies, who holds patents on mp3 related technology, to take me to court if I continue to distribute products containing "their" technology, I have decided to remove the BladeEnc binaries from my homepage.

This leads me to wonder about the status of the MP3 protocol. It seems that the companies writing letters to BladeEnc are claiming something about their proprietary MP3 technology (sorry, the letter is kind of vague, plus IANAL). Who actually owns the MP3 protocol? Is it a standard?

If somehow MP3 encoding techniques are deemed to not be standards, but proprietary technology, is this acceptable by law? What I mean is, if one cannot build MP3's openly like this, can those cartels who hold the MP3 status be considered a monopoly (or, more aptly, an oligarcholopy)?

In a general case like this, with something that is supposed to be a standard, it seems almost as bad for several companies to keep competitors (especially open-source ones that won't or can't pay the big dues to become a member) out of the fray than it is for a single company to prevent upstart competition.

Haiku

Blade encoder slain
By owners of ideas
Music plays no more

New licensing info

Fraunhoffer and Thompson recently changed their licensing policy - you can read the new version here: http://www.mp3licensing.com/index.html

Basically, it's like $2.50 per player, minimum of $15,000 per product. Quite a lot for any project.

This is news?

I assumed that I had just missed this from a while ago!

You (and SlashDot) did. The news page [mp3.no] has this in the 2000-02-23 update:

You might wonder why I haven't put up any binaries for 0.92.0. The reason is that I'm still having trouble with Fraunhofer/Thomson and things are starting to heat up. Since their complaint is that I'm distributing products using their patented technology and they now are threatening to take me to court if I don't stop, I've decided to remove the binaries from my homepage.

I will remove the binaries tomorrow, but you can rest assure that this is not the end of BladeEnc. I will place all the necessary details on these pages in a few days, so please don't mail me asking for details yet, I'll be busy writing together a lengthy piece explaining the situation, what I plan to do and what you can do to help.

Re:New licensing info

you're right.. I mistyped. It's $2.50 an encoder, $0.50 a decoder. Sorry 'bout that.

Re:Is MP3 a standard???

My understanding (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if wrong) is that the protocol is unencumbered and standard, but the standard only addresses decoding the compressed audio. Encoding is more of a black art, as there are a bunch of different techniques which can be used, some of which are patented (Fraunhofer, etc.).

So I don't think you will see any lawsuits over mp3 players, but if the specific mp3 encoding technologies that bladeenc uses were patented and the patent is valid, the author might have some legal problems.

Question: is open source a liability in this case? If you couldn't see someone's source code to see how they implemented something like this, how would you determine if it was a patent violation?

Cease and desist letters.

For all of you with questionable materials on your website:
Ignore any and all e-mails claiming to be a cease and desist notice. Delete the @#$% things. Don't respond. Somebody who really wants to sue you will take the effort to send you a registered letter. You can refuse to sign for that too. If they're really determined they'll serve you in person. Once they do that, you have to either retain a lawyer or take the shit down, but you don't need to do anything in response to e-mail.
IANAL - Even if I was a lawyer I'd put that there since I love typing ANAL in all-caps.
--Shoeboy.
(former microserf)

Re:Flame me if I'm wrong here....

But, isn't MP3 based off of JPEG compression which is in fact an OPEN standard, therefore not copywritten???

"Standard" does not mean "free". Unix is a standard, and it costs $$$ for an OS to be able to call itself Unix. Motif is a standard, and until recently, it took $$$ to (legally) get Motif. Fortunately, neither of these standards had patents, so it was possible to reimplement them. Unfortunately, sometimes vendors sandbag standards bodies by filing patent applications which are granted after the standard is released. Other standards bodies don't need to be sandbagged.

The olde "Standardise my Patent" Gambit.

It's a well known maneuver and one that standard bodies need to address more aggressively. The trick works like this; You create something cool like a new document format or network protocol. You then apply for a patent on this. Meanwhile you submit it to the IETF, ASCII, IEEE and the rest.

If the concept becomes approved and widely used, even entrenched you then let the other shoe drop and start demanding license fees from everybody. MP3 and GIF are the most notorious examples of this gambit.

The solution is for all standards bodies to require a signed declaration stating "This isn't patented and any patent we have to cover it is invalid". At least one body dose this already ( May be the IETF but I am not sure ). The rest should fall strictly into line.

Force industry to try and push new stuff without calling them "standard" or choose to give up royalties.

Ogg Vorbis -- again...

Vorbis [xiph.org]!

Without any further ado, I refer you to my earlier comments, this [slashdot.org], which references this [slashdot.org].

Bug me for Vorbis Tools 0.5 binaries via email. I've been having trouble with the web-based server I've been trying to use.

Kenneth, Vorbize, Ogg123, and mp3tovorbis author

The patent is not on the format,

it's on the compression method. The MP3 standard itself is an ISO standard (MPEG1/2) and it is not patented. Whether bladeenc actually uses the patented compression method or not, is another problem. It would also be nice to know in which countries this patent is supposed to hold (I know Fraunhofer's original patent is for Germany); incidentally, it would be nice to know in which countries, if any, software techniques can not be patented (I think France is like that, but I'm not sure).

Anyway, sadly, as we well know, what matters is not who's right but who has the best lawyers.

Re:Is MP3 a standard???

MP3 is part of the MPEG standard, which was developed under the auspices of ISO. ISO has a patent policy, which basically states that anyone contributing to a standard must be willing to offer licenses to any of their intellectual property (usually patents) that is REQUIRED TO IMPLEMENT that standard. These licenses must be offered to all people requesting one, and must be for "reasonable terms and conditions". That doesn't mean free - the IPR owner can set their own fee schedule, as long as it's not outrageous.

The intent is that the requirement that anyone can get a license will stop companies from saying "we'll contribute our technology to a standard", then turning around and refusing to license it to their main competitor. That's OK as far as it goes. However, the fact that the holder can set any fees they want as long as they're "reasonable" is where the problems usually arise. When only big companies implemented standards, this wasn't a bid deal - what's $5K plus $0.10 per copy to a multinational? With the advent of open source, and decoders for standards being given away in boxes of cereal, any fee at all can make adoption of a standard go very slowly.

The ISO committees that put these standards together have a very tough job (I was the editor of an image compression standard, just approved last month - I know how much work goes into putting a standard together). A big part of that job is the desire to make sure that IPR hassles won't block widespread of adoption of the standard. JPEG is often used as an example of how well things can go - and it's also a good example of how poorly things can go. Not many people who haven't worked closely with JPEG know that the standard includes a lot of features that just aren't used. It's no coincidence that many of these unused features require getting patent licenses (not free ones). So the committees spend endless hours wrangling about intellectual property: attempting to get holders to make their licenses free, revising the draft standard if there's an IPR holder who is being intransigent, and so on. This isn't always entirely successful, but it usually gets most of the IPR holders lined up, reducing the problem and sometimes entirely eliminating it. In some cases (as with JPEG) a baseline profile is defined that avoids all IPR (if this is possible).

Like the Burn All GIFs Day?

OggVorbis (.ogg) is to MPEG Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) as Deflation (.png) is to LZW (.gif).

There was a protest [burnallgifs.org] when Unisys laid the smack-down on free use of LZW compression in GIF. If the League for Programming Freedom [mit.edu] wants to get involved, burnallmp3s. org is available [networksolutions.com].

Re:The patent is not on the format,

I was pleasantly surprised upon reading the Mexican Patent Institute's charter, and found out that patents on computer software, natural phenomena and mathematical formulae are expressly forbidden, and reverse engineering is expressly permitted, for interoperability reasons.

Damn, we have nice laws, but lousy beaurocrats :-(

-elf

Xiph.org is developing Ogg Vorbis.

Ogg Vorbis [xiph.org] is an unencumbered audio compression format with a reference library under Lesser GPL. The format is frozen; when 1.0 comes out, we can Burn All MP3s (the domain is available) like we [networksolutions.com]burned all GIFs [burnallgifs.org].

Re:Cease and desist letters.

Signal 11 is just babbling as usual, although Shoeboy is technically correct. Nonetheless, if the judge has the authorized the use of electronic cease and desist notifications, it is usually not a good idea to refuse to comply, as this would invariably make the judge irritated. Needless to say, this is not highly recommended. Moreover, a motion for a change of venue is not as easy to obtain as you seem to suggest that it is. Generally speaking, you cannot force the court to change the venue across the country, especially if you are being sued in a state court. Attempting to do so would most likely bring more displeasure from the bench. Finally, I have no idea why you would consider it sticking it to them hard to "substitute the judge." The judge basically has the final decision on whether to recluse himself/herself or not, barring exceptional circumstances. Following Signal 11's advice is likely to produce little benefit for yourself and predispose the judge against you. Not a good idea.

By the way, as "someone who's been there, and done that", you seem spectecularly clue-impared. Have you ever actually tried what you are suggesting?

oh, THIS one is gonna piss me off...

From the licensing page [mp3licensing.com]:

We do not charge royalties for mp3 streaming or mp3 broadcasting (e.g. Internet Radio) until the end of the year 2000. Beyond this date we anticipate to charge a small annual minimum and a percentage of revenue. However, this model is not yet fully developed because we cannot yet oversee where this new market is going.

Shoutcast and Icecast/Liveice users, be ready -- you're next. Not only do you have to pay the RIAA for the recordings, and BMI/ASCAP/SOCAN for the music, you'll now have to pay these jerks for the software. Kinda rediculous, considering I've never seen an online broadcaster of music using mp3 technology showing more than, say, a couple hundred in the audience...most broadcasters had only 2-10 listeners before RIAA decided to shut them down anyways...

And if $15,000 is what they've got for minimums elsewhere, I'd hate to see what "small" is in this instance...

Quality anyone?

Hey, I dunno about you, but as cool as Blade is, being open-source and all, I have serious reservations about its psychoacoustic model. If you're transferring over anything less than a T1, bandwidth still matters, and that means quality-at-a-given-bitrate matters.

Ignore IP law for a few minutes, and try something like the first few seconds New Order's "Blue Monday" or some other "simple drum track". Encode it with Blade/128, Blade/160, and Blade/192. Then try Fraun, Gogo, or even friggin' Xing at the same bitrates.

I'm no fan of Xing, but I'll betcha you'll be able to hear the difference between Blade and Fraun at least at 160, and maybe even 192.

I consider Blade/128 unlistenable - but even I was surprised when I could tell the difference between Blade/160 and Fraun/160. And after a few tries, I was able to distinguish between Blade/192 and Fraun/192.

For reference purposes, as far as my ears went, (um, and my headphones went) Fran/128 sounded as good as Blade/192, and Fraun/160 and Fraun/192 were indistinguishable from each other and the CD.

Yes, some encoders perform better than others on different types of music. But for many types of music, Blade isn't the right answer from a quality point of view.

Re:Try freenet

I can't wait for Freenet to get out of beta. According to the documentation:

1. IMPORTANT WARNING ----------------- This release of Freenet is a proof-of-concept to test scalability and routing. It does not (yet) provide any meaningful security! Please do not insert or request any material which would place you at risk if your anonymity were compromised. If you require strong anonymity, please wait for the next release. However, if you want to help us test and develop the system, please carry on!

BladeEnc was the first encoder I used for encoding my albums into MP3. I've converted approximately 1/5 of my CD collection (maybe 70 albums), using Blade as well as the Lame encoder, and they both sound excellent at the right bitrates.

I noticed that the legal trouble has been going on for quite some time. I was perusing the BladeEnc site again looking for graphical frontends a couple months ago (yeah, I know it's not 'leet - pshaw), which was when I first noticed the message.

It's troubling to me that so many smaller sites are becoming pressured into removing or self-censoring their own work, but I guess it's better than having the sites shut down entirely.

Hopefully Freenet will be able to get their work out of beta and garner some support, before the web is completely sucked of life, fun, and excitement. In the meantime, it would be cool if some of the e-conomy's Instant Winners would help out by setting up some legal funds.

Re:question

actually, there can (and is) great differences in the sound quality that different encoder produce.

Here's an article that explains why.
http://arstechnica.com/wanker desk/1q00/mp3/mp3-1.html [arstechnica.com]

It's a lossy compression, so what gets 'lost' greatly affects the sound quality.

Deciding what to 'lose' is what makes one encoder different from another

Not true

MP3 is a file format. The algorithm used to arrive at this format varies, as does the sound quality.

That's like saying, "If two chefs output the same kind of omelette, how would one taste better than the other? This is like the great egg debate, farm fresh eggs with Government Grade AAA certificates versus Kwik-E-Mart corner-store eggs past their expiration dates. Which is better. Strangely enough with OMX testing no one can tell."

Anyways, if you don't believe me, you should try some different chefs^H^H^H^H^Hencoders for yourself. I'll bet ya $5 you can tell them apart.

A few other turds in their licensing terms

I found a couple of other interesting things in the licensing terms on www.mp3licensing.com.

Electronic Music Distribution systems, where mp3 encoded data is sold to end-users, are licensed as follows:
* 1.0 % of the price charged to the listener (minimum US$ 0.01 per download).

* US$ 15,000 annual minimum, payable upon signature and each following year in January, fully creditable against annual sales.

Does this mean that if I use a properly licensed encoder to create MP3's and I sell those MP3's on my website, that I'm supposed to give them more money? What gives? Their patent covers the encoding process, and if I use an encoder that properly licensed, they should stop taking money from my wallet right there.

If I give away MP3's on my website (and maybe have paid banner ads or somesuch), are they still going to demand licensing fees?

Also, in the Broadcasting/streaming section:

We do not charge royalties for mp3 streaming or mp3 broadcasting (e.g. Internet Radio) until the end of the year 2000. Beyond this date we anticipate to charge a small annual minimum and a percentage of revenue.

Again, once I've encoded an MP3 with a licensed encoder, what's their basis for charging me solely based on how I distribute it? What if I do my streaming by embedding Windoze Media Player as an ActiveX control in my page and point it at the HTTP URL for the MP3 I want to stream? How is this legally any different from having people download it to their hard drive and playing it from there?

Jeez. If they're gonna be fartknockers about trying to squeeze money from people, they could at least be a little less vague about it.

-----

Yup, it's the worst case.

>Does this mean that if I use a properly licensed
>encoder to create MP3's and I sell those MP3's on
>my website, that I'm
>supposed to give them more money?

That's exactly it. Now you see why companies are suddenly throwing money and programmers at Ogg Vorbis :-) We'll have mp3 fairly thoroughly replaced within the industry by year's end. Don't worry too much, you *do* have an Open, bulletproof alternative in Ogg.

> What gives? Their patent covers the encoding
> process, and if I use an encoder
> that properly licensed, they should stop taking
> money from my wallet right there.

They obviously disagree, and they have lawyers with sticks.

Monty
http://www.xiph.org/

No, only video

The compression used on MPEG video has a lot in common with JPEG. It uses the compression JPEG uses with some additional techniques that make use of the fact that a frame is probably similar to the one before it.

The audio is completely unrelated. The redundancy in audio data doesn't look anything like the redundancy in video data. The only similarities are that MPEG video and MPEG audio are both lossy, and they are both defined in the same piece of paper.

Fraunhofer holds a patent on a specific way to transform uncompressed audio data into a MPEG level 3 compressed audio stream. According to Ars Technica's review a while back, the quality is significantly better than anything else out there.

Just for the record, the issue is *patents*, not copyright. Secondly, patents are on mechanisms, not ideas. The patent is on "how to create a datastream that can be decoded in such and such a way which sounds closest to the original to human ears". It isn't on the idea of "compress audio data to save space".

Compression algorithms and cryptosystems are frequently patented. There are probably a lot of patents on how to digitally sample audio, too. Fraunhofer's patent on MP3s is the one everyone is most concerned with right now, because it isn't clear just exactly what is covered (some encoders, all encoders, or all encoders and decoders?).

NIST and AES

The body you're thinking of is the NIST, the arm of the federal goverment that amongst other things sets FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standardcs). The signed declaration that you mention was required in order to participate in the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) contest. The NIST has reminded the participants several times that they agree to give up rights to all patents on the algorithms they submit in the event of winning the AES contest, and has stated bluntly that it will pursue anti-trust action with all the power of the federal government against any company which attempts to patent portions of the eventual AES winner.

I believe the IEEE has done something of the same with their proposed public key encryption standards. Unfortunately, until the RSA patent expires, those standards are caught in never-never land.

-E

Ogg Vorbis vs. MP3

Like many of you, the Ogg Vorbis project was just brought to my attention this evening. The project aims to replace MP3 as a standard audio compression system. In light of the current MP3 patent issues I decided to download the CVS code and give it a whirl.

Building the Code
The Vorbis library and examples compiled without error. Included in the CVS code examples is an encoder and a decoder. An Xmms plugin is also included, but does not get built from the main Makefile. Simply cd xmms && make and it compiles just fine.

The Objective
My objective here was to test the encoder, so I popped my Weird Al "bad hair day" CD in and ripped track 10 to a 16 bit, stereo 44100 Hz WAV file. I then `cat`ed this file to the Vorbis encoder and sent the output to larry.ogg. For the sake of a decent comparison, I bladeenc'd the same WAV file to a 128k 44.1 MP3 file.

Findings
The .ogg file turned out to be about a meg larger, weighing in at 4720244 bytes. The sound quality was good. I couldn't tell the difference between the .ogg file and the MP3, using mediocre audio hardware and the Vorbis Xmms plugin.

Conclusion
In conclusion I can honestly say that Ogg Vorbis impressed me. The project has yet to release a stable version, and the sound quality is already in place. Since the Vorbis team is still ironing out the code, little if any optimizations have been done. Once the code is optimized the .ogg output file should be much closer to the size of the MP3.

Implications
The Ogg Vorbis project has given us a royalty/restriction-free alternative to MP3. I believe that the one thing that this project lacks is exposure. Once people realize that a "libre" alternative is available, usage will increase. With usage comes bug reports, developers, third-party utilities and peer review.

Availability
The Vorbis website is housed at: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis [xiph.org]

No

First, LAME was not developed in a "clean room" at all; it's based on the ISO reference code, which is horribly buggy and far from optimal. Blade is based on the same code, but doesn't have anywhere nearly the same level of work put into it.

Second, while cleanroom techniques are a fine defense against copyrights, they make no difference whatsoever for patents. So the idea of starting a new cleanroom MP3 encoder project wouldn't really help matters.

What would, though, is the creation of a new format that is free of intellectual property problems. While you're at it, wouldn't it be nice if it included amplitude shaping to make transients sound crisper, and used a few other techniques to achieve better quality compression with MP3? Oh, and why not lots of work integrating it into free software tools such as XMMS? Why doesn't somebody do this?

Ah yes, they have [xiph.org], they have.

Software patents ...

... are, at least THEORETICALLY illegal in Europe according to the Munich convention, 1972. The European Patent Office, however, has illegally granted quite a number of those. Anyway, since those patents are not legal, Faunhofer/Thomson has no legal foot to stand on to threaten that guy. It's your usual corporate bullying again. And no your post is not interesting, no matter what moderators have drunk today.