New MP3 License Terms Demand $0.75 Per Decoder

Götz writes "The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version."

Thank god for ogg!

http://www.vorbis.com/

Re:Thank god for ogg!

"uh, glad i used wma since it better quality, just make sure you turn off the m$ secure digital contect 'feature'"

You have been tricked. WMA is inferior quality but the encoder boosts the volume by 3 db which is known to make people think it sounds better.

Now I think that WMA does a better job for very low bitrate compared to mp3 (but of course ogg rules here) but WMA, overall, is inferior quality.

Re:Thank god for ogg!

But of course there's a converter. Here's one right over at Freshmeat called mp32ogg [freshmeat.net]. Seems to work fairly well, too, but since mp3 is lossy, and ogg is lossy, you might lose a little quality. I never noticed anything, though.

Re:Thank god for ogg!

a mp3->ogg converter would still need to decode the mp3.

you want to cough up the $0.75?

Re:Thank god for ogg!

You don't want to encode mp3 to ogg; the artifacts that both introduce when multiplied together can be _really_ nasty, much more so than the individual artifacts.

Re-rip your CD collection from scratch, and encode directly to .ogg - it'll be a better encoding, and no need for an mp3 decoder.

Re:Thank god for ogg!

Transcoding, as it as been so named, is inherently a Bad Thing(TM). Going from one lossy format to another only further degrades the quality of the file.

Take for example making a photocopy of a passage from a book. You then take this photocopy and fax it to me. The quality degradation is that same that will happen when you transcode from MP3 to Ogg.
So if you have MP3s currently, either leave them as MP3, or re-rip them directly from the CD(You did pay for these songs, right? ;)

Re:Thank god for ogg!

However, as long as you are willing to live with a slight loss of quality and/or a slight increase in file size, it should be nowhere near as bad as for analog files. If you do mp3->wav, the wave file should already be quantized in such a way that it is easily compressable by another program. In principle, for instance, you should be able to re MP3 encode with no further loss of quality (whether actual MP3 encoders do this is another question). Ogg uses a different algorithm, so there will be a slight degredation, but it shouldn't be that bad if the encoder is designed to handle low entropy input well.

Whether this happens in reality, I don't know, but I am sure some smart people could figure out a way to do it.

Fair use

Yes, even patents have fair use. The law covers commercial use, not private use. Now, RH may get in trouble for selling the binary, but tothing prevents you from providing information (source code) about how to make the invention. In fact, this is what the patent office does. Nothing stops me from looking at a turnup twaddler in the store and going home and making one. I only get in trouble if I sell the a turnup twaddler!

Re:Fair use

"I only get in trouble if I sell the a turnup twaddler!"

Or, more specifically, if you give away turnip twaddlers. Or, possibly, if you use unlicensed turnip twaddlers in your commercial kitchen, and
have used them in the preparation of the twaddled turnips you have for sale.

Re:Fair use

How dare they?!? We the people demand our fair-use rights to twaddled turnips! Next theing you know they'll have a license fee to carry a twaddled turnip in public, and a license to carry a concealed twaddled turnips. Pretty soon, you'll have to pay a fee for every bite you take out of a Twaddled turnip, and they'll be designed to rot away instantly if you try to pass the twaddled turnip to your neighbor! And what do we do if they get the refrigerator makers in on this? so you can only store twaddled turnips if you've paid up on your licenses? And what about people who own a cooler? Will we have to relicense our twadled turnips to transport them via the cooler? Will we be able to put any unused twaddled turnips back in the fridge later?!? Put an end to the maddness it's time the twaddled turnip users unite! Let's fill the hills with unlicened ice-houses and unliceneced turnip twaddlers. We can even grow our own crop of turnips to make sure their quality isn't compromized by anti-twaddling genetic modifications.

Re:Do they not realize the effect of this?

This won't kill MP3. This has been in effect for years now, I have NO idea why /. thinks this is news, that page hasn't even changed. Research much? Anyway, Mp3 ius entrenched, and end users still aren't being hurt, unless they have to pay for their sw mp3 player, but there will always be a huge company like AOL (WinAmp) who is willing to foot the bill. FhG has had this rule in effect, they just haven't enforced it on tiny players.

Re:Do they not realize the effect of this?

This has been in effect for years now, I have NO idea why /. thinks this is news

What's new is that the longstanding royalty exception for free software / freeware programs has been removed. I can't find any historical info on the exception from the mp3 licensing site (probably because Fraunhofer isn't eager to publicize the fact that there once was an exception), but if you look in other places like the Debian mailing lists [debian.org], you can read what the old policy was.

Re:Do they not realize the effect of this?

I continually am amazed at firms that do this. Does not even the lowly geek admin at this place realize this will eventually kill mp3 as a used format, thus killing their source of revenue?

If they don't charge they have zero revenue. Charging $0.75 a decoder or $50k to $60 one time fee isn't that big of a deal for commercial companies making decoders. The only ones this hurt is the open source and free decoders, and they aren't making money from those anyway.

I agree that charging fees after the format is underhanded, and possibly grounds for anti-trust violations, but giving it away for free isn't exactly a great business decision either.

They've got a good racket going...

i wonder how much money they're pulling in from mp3-related things? Anyone got a rough estimate?

And wouldn't this hurt the proliferation of mp3 encoders running around, thereby possibly limiting the amount of mp3s that are available to the general public? Maybe we just need to use .ogg? :)

Lordfly

Re:They've got a good racket going...

Racket? If you ask me, the mp3 patents are some of the few decent patents we regularly hear about.

People take mp3s for granted now, but the patents involved cover real innovation, not bullshit like the one-click Amazon patents, or such.

Re:They've got a good racket going...

The problem isn't the patents themselves. I have not heard anyone dispute any innovation that may have resulted in these patents.

The problem is the way that these patents were handled. Patents that are not enforced immediately should be automatically revoked by law. Protect them immediately, or lose them.

The use of MP3 wasn't low profile. People weren't using the patents without the patent holders knowlege.

IMHO, this is WORSE than the Amazon patents.

Re:They've got a good racket going...

The use of MP3 wasn't low profile. People weren't using the patents without the patent holders knowlege.

Actually the Fraunhofer institute did make it clear that their software was patented from the very start. The Mp3 phenomena started when someone took code that was clearly marked as proprietary, for non commercial use only and married it to a CD ripper.

The basic problem we have here is that the whole MP3 world started with people who were pretty careless about intellectual property in general. They wanted free music and they just saw MP3 as a way to get it. Napster wanter to make billions by helping consumers rip off the record labels, their due dilligence and understanding of IP turned out to be as naive as their understanding of business models.

Much as I would love to say this is a GIF type submarine patent issue, unfortunately it is not. MP3 is a part of the MPEG standard and the fact that a license was required was spelled out in advance. All you had to do was read the specification.

As a general principle the GIF situation is indefensible. The designers of GIF should have had available to them the fact that a patent had been applied for. It is only the corrupt rules of the USPTO that allowed this information to be kept secret.

Maybe if Napster and the rest of the MP3 scene had been a bit more concerned about IP issues in general then they would have realized that using a proprietary scheme would risk giving control over the technology to a private interest. In effect a non-essential patent was converted into an essential patent that every hardware vendor now has to license.

I would prefer to use Ogg or WMA simply because they are better schemes, fewer bits for the same quality. But my Archos device only supports MP3 so that is what I rip to.

Re: They've got a good racket going...

Actually the Fraunhofer institute did make it clear that their software was patented from the very start.

I think you're missing a very important fact here: Algorithms as employed in the MP3 format were NOT patentable in many countries when MP3 first showed up and Fraunhofer's reference implementation was published.

I'm really glad that not that many countries have jumped that US "you can patent everything, including algorithms and IP" train even yet.

Re: They've got a good racket going...

So if I needed several hours to figure something out I should be able to patent it? Just figured out a new mouseclick combination to navigate faster through Slashdot...

And, regarding E=mc^2: Don't you think it took several hours as well to come to this conclusion? So why don't you think one should be able to patent this formula as well?

This is the problem with algorithm patents. They're not a "product". It's very dangerous to make mathematical formulas patentable, because most of them are just observations like "hey, this and this has happened if I combine numbers A and B like this", not inventions.

Just imagine someone would own a patent on Fast-Fourier-Transformation (FFT). What would happen? This is very close to JPEG and MP3 techniques, btw.

Want to play your mp3 CDs in a few years?

MP3 only came up because it was available at low-to-no-cost. Regarding some of the patents, of course. Nobody would've had used it if they had charged this decoder fee from the very beginning, and they know!

Do what I am going to do: Write a letter (paper!) to Fraunhofer and Thomson and explain your concerns.

Yes, I know about Ogg Vorbis and stuff, but there's no reason not to protest against changed mp3 licenses.

I don't want to re-compress all my mp3s to Ogg because this will reduce quality. So I will still have mp3s around in several years (don't mention all those CDs I burned). So this is an issue, since I will need a player/decoder to access them.

Contact Fraunhofer:

Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen
Am Wolfsmantel 33
91058 Erlangen
Germany
Phone [phone]
Fax [phone]
Email: [e-mail] [mailto]

(Interesting: On the English homepage, their postal address doesn't show up - only eMail addresses. On the German homepage, it does.)

Contact Thomson:

Thomson multimedia
16935 W. Bernardo Drive # 103
San Diego, CA 92127
USA
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail] [mailto]

Re:i wonder

Winamp has already bought a license.

AOL did however get into trouble because they tried to use the fact they owned Nullsoft to get out of buying another, see the license wasn't transferable.

Re:Probable consequences?

Ogg is most definitely "there yet."

Call me when my Apex AD600A or my Rio Volt SP90 will start playing Ogg. Without hardware support, it'll go nowhere. (I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it most definitely is not there yet.)

Re:Probable consequences?

The issue isn't over freeware players, it's over the license.

Winamp already has a license, and they don't pay 75 cents per download either. Winamp draws revenue because their mindshare gets people to winamp.com, AOL also pushes Winamp (they own Nullsoft now).

You can pay the one time fee and continue to develop a freeware player, Thomson and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft want you to continue to use mp3, they don't want to kill it. They simply are letting people know that they want everyone to pay up.

Is it kind of dumb to do this? Maybe, but you must understand this won't kill mp3. Your hardware mp3 player will come with the decoder license (of course) and your freeware player will have paid for it first too.

Simply: just because the player is freeware doesn't mean the developers are poor. Nullsoft has AOL/TW behind them and Windows Media Player? I don't know anyone tighter with Fraunhofer.

But, BTW: Ogg is just as good if not better than mp3. Maybe not as popular, but the fidelity is there.

Re:to the rescue

Seems to me that it would be a lot easier for them to pay up than to write their own fixed-point ogg decoder without a proper specification (since there is none right now).

The Vorbis 1.0 release came with a complete specification [xiph.org]. I'm currently using these specs to implement lossless editing code for Ogg Vorbis files, so I can speak to their accuracy and completeness.

Let me guess: You formed all your opinions based on Rob Leslie's old kuro5hin article [kuro5hin.org], and didn't bother to see if they were still valid. Right?

What can MP3 do for me that Ogg Vorbis can't?

I'm not trolling (this time). I really want to know.

Re:What can MP3 do for me that Ogg Vorbis can't?

mp3 has hardware support. Ogg Vorbis does not.

Re:Show your support for this petition then.

Don't waste your time with "hardware manufacturers". Convince Apple to include Ogg Vorbis support on the iPod.

As soon as an iPod with Ogg Vorbis is released, you can bet the rest of the mp3 player manufacturers will be scrambling to get it on their products.

Such is the power of Apple.

"Godzilla and Jaguar: Punch! Punch! Punch! Hit! Hit! Hit!
We die if they stop fighting for us."
Jet Jaguar Song, "Godzilla vs. Megalon"

Portable Ogg-based players?

I'm hoping that this decision will result in (more?) portable Ogg-based players hitting the market! I would have purchased an iPod immediately had it supported Ogg; however, it didn't, and I was not about to convert my music back to MP3 just for it.

If anyone knows of any portable players that support Ogg Vorbis, please post below! Thank You!

Re:Portable Ogg-based players?

You could always get a sharp zaurus and use it to play your ogg files.

Re:Portable Ogg-based players?

How is a $0.75 fee per decoder gonna impact MP3 players, exactly? Do you think that *anybody, manufacturer or buyer, is gonna notice $0.75 in a several hundred dollar product? Come on.

The user won't notice, most likely. However, if you notice, the minimum annual licensing is $15,000 US per year. So even if a manufacturer's product flops, they have to shell out 15 grand anyway. And if the product does well, say it ships 2 million units, that's $1.5 Million dollars in royalties.

When presented with those options, which one would you pick? Some people, especially much smaller companies, will go with the royalty-free solution.

MiniDisc?

Expensive discs (per MB, compared to CD-R), expensive players (compared to MP3-capable CD players), proprietary format controlled by evil giant Sony, none of my friends have them, can't store them on my hard drive, can't download them off the 'net, can't burn to audio CD (without going to analog or using a pro CD burner which defeats SCMS), what's to like?

There outta be a law...

I thought the whole idea of patent law was to get new ideas to market by providing a temporary monopoly to the creator.

It seems like we have the cart leading the horse. Inventors are now embedding their ideas into standards, waiting until adoption, and then enforcing their monopoly.

This is dirty pool, and I hope it doesn't last.

Re:There outta be a law...

Nope, that's trademark. You can submarine a patent for as long as you like *cough*GIF*cough*.

Re:There outta be a law...

It seems like we have the cart leading the horse. Inventors are now embedding their ideas into standards, waiting until adoption, and then enforcing their monopoly.

This is dirty pool, and I hope it doesn't last.

I agree with you completely. Unfortunately, I think it will last. We, as techies and as citizens, will need to more vigilant determining what we will adopt as 'standard'.

JPG, GIF, MP3, etc. We have to learn the lesson eventually.

More evidence to oppose the W3C RAND lisencing proposal.

What about overseas distributions?

I wonder if distributions made on countries that do not accept software patents can still include MP3 decoders. That would, of course, mean the end of sales of this distributions on the US, or the development of US versions and "patent infringing" versions of the distributions, the same way there was a strong and weak crypto version of RH. I live in a country where (until the US forces us to change our laws) we do not believe that software or algorithmic ideas can be patented, and we have our own distros. I wouldnt like these distros to change just because of US laws and the US market.

Winamp download still available free

Well, I guess NullSoft has decieded to pay the bill themselves. Because Winamp 3.0 [winamp.com] is still available as of now for free download [winamp.com].

i'm lazy, spell it out please.

here's where slashdot can really shine. I, like many of you out there, have scanned my album collection into mp3 format. Why? Because this was the most popular, ubiquitous format when I did it. I'd love to go to ogg. To do so, i need a simple way to recurse through about 36 gigs of mp3s and reencode them into ogg, and delete the originals. I know there's no reason why one shell command shouldn't suffice. I know if I were to do a decent search through freshmeat, i'd be able to find a command-line program to do it, and the proper args, etc. But i know someone here already knows it. ***PLEASE*** post instructions, and whatever software i need to get, and yours is the karma and everything in it.

Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please.

Basically: don't. You will suffer a lot of degradation. Both are lossy formats, and going from one to another will have a large impact on the sound quality. For stuff like audio books or Britney Spears, where the sound quality is of little importance, it may still suffice, but for music you really care about it will just not be good enough. As you no doubt have the original CD:s - you do have them, right? - it's far preferable to rip them again into ogg.

/Janne

Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please.

if I take a wav -> 128 bit mp3 -> 192 bit mp3 is the result of the 192 bit any worse than the 128?

Almost certainly, yes. An encoder would use a different strategy to encode a 128 kbit MP3 and a 192 kbit MP3. If certain frequency ranges are discarded when encoding 128 kbit, and other frequency ranges when encoding 192kbit, if you encode to 128kbit, and decode/recode to 192kbit, you will lose both ranges of frequencies.

why wouldn't you be able to produce an ogg from an mp3 that is no worse than the mp3?

See above.

I just don't buy the blanket argument that lossy -> lossy has to produce even more lossy.

Depends on the nature of the lossiness, grasshopper.

Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please.

Encoding quality isn't a simple analog scale from good to bad. When you convert from one lossy format to another you get the worst of both at best. Potentially you could have some mutual-reinforcement of quality problems.

I've just gotten into this (ignored the MP3 bandwagon), but my plan is to use flac, a lossless encoder, then re-enc to the lossy format de jour as needed.

-Peter

Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please.

do this experiment... Open a photo, save as a low-quality quality JPEG. Repeat 3 times. Look at photo. It gets worse every time.

Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please.

Oggasm [sourceforge.net] does exactly what you want, with far more robustness than a shell script.

Pass it on

Absolutely brilliant. Wait until it gets mass market acceptance, then start charging fees. Now that I've got a portable MP3 player, an MP3-compatible DVD player, and all 300+ CD's in my collection digitized in MP3 format, now bring out the fees. You win, guys, here's my $3.00 for the car, the DVD deck, and WinAmp on my laptop and desktop. Sure beats re-recording everything in Ogg, which wasn't mainstream enough when I first started ripping my CD's a couple of years back.

What? You don't agree? Well, my time's worth the $3. If they charged $10 per decoder, I'd still probably pay it - and in fact, that's the only mistake I think they're making, not charging enough. Because while I'd gladly pay $3 today, they should realize that going forward, I won't rip a single song in MP3 format. They'll make short-term revenues by screwing guys like me, but they're digging a hole in the long run.

Hmm. Not bad.

You know, this is actually pretty cheap. I had no idea how inexpensive this was...I thought Fraunhaufer & Co were taking a percentage of your company's profits a la Unisys, or a per song cost. $.75 per player is nothing...I have a dozen players, hardware & software alike, and they all amount to under $10. Not bad, considering how great the technology behind MP3 is.

Sure, they're profiteering, but they're profiteering off of a format they helped produce and thought to patent. MP3 encoding isn't exactly no duh stuff like hyperlinks or LZW compression (which is essentially a really fast look up table). And sure, there's Ogg, but I don't like the sound as much and my consumer devices don't support it.

You can bitch and moan about how this will kill mp3, but I think it's obvious nothing will kill MP3 -- the technology is too widely supported. What it means, though, is that GPL'd and other free decoders are going to have to ammend the license to be sure Fraunhoffer gets its money. This is a perfect time to test whether or not the GPL can play nice in the IP pool.

Re:Hmm. Not bad.

So, are you going to donate the $60K to SPI so that Debian can redistribute xmms? I'd guess not. This won't kill MP3, but it will kill MP3 with free software. Oh well...

Yes, the have the patent, and the right to license the patent as they choose. Their choice (make it free until it's widely used, then start charging money) makes them assholes. This is exactly what happens when you start relying on patented technology, and proves that the folks over at Xiph were right all along.

As far as $0.75/per unit being trivial, you should investigate the economics of consumer electronics. That $0.75 might well be half the profit on a low-end device.

Re:Not charging end users

WinAmp and MusicMatch will do just fine. Note there is a "patent only" option at $50,000 flat-rate. As much as AOL paid for WinAmp, they should have no problem paying 50 grand to keep the doors open (and in fact probably already have a licensing deal in place with Fraunhofer that covers WinAmp). Ditto MusicMatch.

Who this kills is the free (as in speech) players - Zinf [zinf.org], XMMS [xmms.org], etc. They can't afford $50k OR $0.75/copy. They can either hope Fraunhofer doesn't notice them, or try to relocate to a place with either no software patents or no Fraunhofer patent, or they can leave MP3. In fact, Linux users in general may be left out in the cold, because I'm not aware of any commercial MP3 decoders for Linux, at all.

Unfortunately, this probably won't be enough to move the world from MP3s. WinAmp will still be downloadable for free, which is all 98% of users care about.

I remember when I was at EMusic [emusic.com], I met with the Thompson guys, who were trying to figure out how to make money on this (circa 1999). I explained to them that nobody was going to pay for a decoder, and that their choice was either to give the decoder away or have people switch to something else. I also suggested the encoder should be free for non-commercial use, in order to cement their current dominance against (then soon-to-be-released) Windows Media.

One of them replied (imagine a German accent), "I see! Vee give avay evrysing for free, and you make more money selling music!"

So, you could say we had a meeting of the minds. :)

Re:Not charging end users

Except that XMMS is not an MP3 player. It happens to have an MP3 decoder bundled with it as an input module -- and it happens that MP3s are what most people use it for -- but it can decode a *ton* of other formats, OGG included, and as a player it won't die. Just take the MP3 module out of the distribution.

Heh

Of course, this is going to start the slew of "Ogg Vorbis is going to be the new standard" posts, to which I say: yeah, right.

Personally, I'm wondering if the RIAA didn't pressure the owners of the patent into doing this, but that's beside the point. The point is, just because something that was free now costs money doesn't mean it's going to vanish overnight. Most people will download a single MP3 player and use that, and 75 cents is a negligible amount in the scheme of iPod pricing.

The way around this, of course, is for a company to write the update to their software, and release it as a program that will patch the executable file, rather than release a whole new file. The fee applies to decoders, not software that modifies the decoders.

Ogg Vorbis is great, it's free, and I hope they add support for it into the iPod and iTunes, but it's still going to be a long time before a format as deeply-entrenched as MP3 disappears.

(Reversing your logic would mean that MS Windoze would cease to be the standard simply because Linux is free.)

Re:Winamp has been ready for this for a while...

Can we just delete this whole news article?

Or moderate this posts as +5 Dumb, Redundant?

Winamp (Nullsoft) already paid for the license. They want mindshare, they don't want to collect per client.

Many clients have already paid because this isn't news.

The far side of patents

One thing everyone seems to forget in this kind of discussion: patents expire. I remember lots of hubbub about the RSA patents on public-key encryption. Well, they came, they went, and the world didn't end in the meantime. Now everyone is free to use those algorithms with no worries about patent infringement.

Now, one could convincingly argue that software patents shouldn't be allowed in the first place, or that they should have shorter terms, or that the patent office doesn't do a competent job of checking for obviousness or prior art. I'd probably agree. But the fact remains that any damage done by patents is at worst a temporary setback to everyone else, not an irretrievable disaster.

At some point, MP3s will no longer be encumbered by patents.

Re:The far side of patents

The problem is that if a industrial patent has a expiration time of 25 years and that is reasonable, because it covers 1 or 2 generations of technology at the most, in the IT industry it isn't, because it covers something between 6 to 10 generations of software...

And that is way to much time to wait for a patent to expire... [and effectivelly kills the usability of the technology or the patent system].

Cheers...

P.S.- I'm not against software patents (per si), just against stupid patents and the patent expiration time...

Re:The far side of patents

There's two small problems with this idea.

First, patents were orginally keyed to the length of your working life. You would spend decades becoming a master of your field, then a patent would protect you during the remainder of your working life. Meanwhile your apprentices would learn this new skill, then extend the art as they became masters.

That worked fine until Britain changed the length of patents to 100 years, to protect some key industries. The net result was that the British industry stalled while Germany (a nation of scofflaws that ignored British IP rights) went from an agarian society to an industrial one.

In this field, your working life is closer to 15 years, with maybe 5 years from your first paying job to when you're (usually) considered to be a fully competent journeyman capable of being "the master" at most reasonably complex shops. The high end is softer, but there's definitely a bias against older programmers. You start to notice it at 35, and it's a real problem at 40.

By this measure, a patent should last maybe 7-10 years, max. Long enough to drive a generation or two of your product, but not so long that a person who just started out when you got your patent can't build on it during their working lifetime.

But this brings up the second point - copyrights used to have a reasonable limit, but for all practical purposes they're now essentially eternal. Maybe the law won't extend the term of copyrights yet again, but I probably won't live long enough for anything written during my lifetime - or even substantially before it - to enter the public domain.

If this stands, I expect to see patent law soon follow. This might be tolerable if patents covered legitimate innovations, but not with the current Patent Office of approving virtually every patent that crosses their desk and letting the courts decide which ones are valid.

Re:The far side of patents

I remember lots of hubbub about the RSA patents on public-key encryption. Well, they came, they went, and the world didn't end in the meantime.

The world didn't end; it was merely set back 20 years.

My check is in the mail !

I love the MP3 format, so my check is in the mail.

Well, not exactly a check, more like 75 pennies.

In an envelope

Postage due

(In college once I paid a $2 [total BS] parking ticket in change, in one of those "postage will be paid by addressee" envelopes.)

This reminds me of another tax...

There is some tax on "music" CD-Rs in Canada, but not on "data" CD-Rs. When I heard this I said, "What!?" So you have the option of paying more for CDs that you will burn your music backups to, and the same for CDs that contain just "ordinary" data.
There has been a tax on recordable magnetic music media for more than a year now, with the proceeds supposedly going to battered musicians, or perhaps just to deter audio tape pirating, I'm not sure which...
Last year there was brief fuss when a Liberal cabinet minister in charge of Canadian Heritage, Shiela Copps, thought that a $400 surcharge on MP3 players, would be a good way to curb music piracy. I don't think the details of how to destinguish an portable MP3 player, from just another computer were able to be worked out, so this was just one reason that ill formed idea died on the table.
So much to tax, so little time. Isn't it bad enough that governments tax our purchases, now we are letting companies write taxes into their licences? Sheesh.

Like the (updated) saying goes

Beware of greeks bearing .gifts.

Where's the facts?

Ok. Most people have figured out by now that these prices have been up for a long time. Is there A) any evidence that open source decoders (like mpg123) are being bullied around, and B) any official statement from Redhat that they're intentionally pulling MP3 decoders from Rawhide?

The definition of irony...

...scads of people who have no problem whatsoever pirating hundreds of gigabytes of $19 CD's throwing a tizzy fit over the notion that someone else might have to pay $0.75.

The minimum's the kicker for me...

Annual minimum royalties are payable upon signature and each following year in January and are fully creditable against annual royalties.
US$ 15 000.00 per calendar year.

Now that's a pain. I emailed them to see if I could get a "hobbyist license" for more per app, but without the $15k minimum (wanted to make "iTunes 3 for Classic Mac OS"). They allow you to release up to 5000 units of a game that uses mp3s royalty free, so I was hopeful. The reply? No dice. (I was impressed they sent a reply!)

Fwiw, here's a list of the licensees [mp3licensing.com].

What packages were removed?

Is there a list somewhere of the packages that were removed from Rawhide? If so, I could compile new meta-rpm such that it would install the latest versions of each onto new RedHat installs.

Be Afraid

I know a lot of people are hoping that .ogg will prevail as a result of this but unfortunately I fear something much worse.

I'm already seeing a ton of songs in .wma format. On P2P systems and from friends. It brings back chilling memories of the not so long ago pre-decent-office-suite-4-linux days where I had to continually bitch and moan in vain that I'm not able to make use of a particular format.

Mp3 is still the most dominant format but I honestly don't think .ogg will be there to save the day if it disappears. I have yet to see one single .ogg file EVER availble for download on a P2P system but I have seen the occasional .wma. So windows media is gradually gaining acceptance. If mp3s die out I highly doubt .ogg has a good chance to take it's place.

--
Garett

Could be worse.

A couple of points:

1. This is an open standard. It's just patented. Patents expire. Nobody is trying to prevent you from writing decoders - they just want to get paid for (I hope) work that they did in developing the technology, which is pretty cool, and which I don't think I could have invented on my own. I am not fond of software patents, but a patent on MP3 is not the same as a patent on one-click or xor cursors.

Compare this to, for example, Real Media player, where the file format isn't *patented* - it's a trade secret. So if Real doesn't support your platform, you can't play real media. This is really awful - much worse than the patent situation with mp3.

2. The royalty is quite reasonable. If you had to pay $0.75 for your copy of WinAMP, would that really seem unfair to you? That's the price of a can of coke, for Pete's sake! It it really that unfair?

3. Like it or not, this is not going to kill MP3, because most MP3 players are commercial, licensed products, and there are a ton of them out there, and they don't support Vorbis. So you don't have to do anything to keep using your MP3s, but if you want to use Vorbis in protest, it's going to be very difficult.

4. I have a large library of audio files that need to get published on the net. They're free, noncommercial, non-revenue-generating. I'll publish them at least in MP3 format, and maybe Ogg if I can get a good encoder. I have a feeling that if I publish Ogg, it's not going to get downloaded very much, but it'll be interesting to see.

Re:Could be worse.

1. This is an open standard. It's just patented. Patents expire. Nobody is trying to prevent you from writing decoders - they just want to get paid for (I hope) work that they did in developing the technology, which is pretty cool, and which I don't think I could have invented on my own. I am not fond of software patents, but a patent on MP3 is not the same as a patent on one-click or xor cursors.

Couple of points here: 1a. Patents expire in 20 years with an option to renew; in practical terms they don't expire especially when it comes to software. 1b. Patent on MP3 is the same as a patent on one-click in that they are both patents on software. They both claim patents on logic, algorithm, functions, whatever you want to call it.

2. The royalty is quite reasonable. If you had to pay $0.75 for your copy of WinAMP, would that really seem unfair to you? That's the price of a can of coke, for Pete's sake! It it really that unfair?

This is purely subjective. I'm sure if the patent license is enforced winamp will come up with a free version that's ad-bloated (plays an ad mp3 after each of your selected mp3s, popups, unders, etc), or paid subscription model like Real did awhile ago. Now, this may be completely reasonable to you, but others who have been playing their mp3s without having to pay for patent royalties or get annoyed by advertizers will not appreciate the change. So they will switch to Windows Media Player which will include the patent payment in the OS price (antitrust?), which will also force them to listen to and encode in WMA.

3. Like it or not, this is not going to kill MP3, because most MP3 players are commercial, licensed products, and there are a ton of them out there, and they don't support Vorbis. So you don't have to do anything to keep using your MP3s, but if you want to use Vorbis in protest, it's going to be very difficult.

I don't think it's going to be MP3 vs OGG, it's going to be MP3 vs WMA and good luck beating MS in this game. Just like I said above. Also, consider MS requiring you to use their DRM with WMAs when or as they get a hold of some market share. This will bring up so many issues it's a topic of several separate discussions.

4. I have a large library of audio files that need to get published on the net. They're free, noncommercial, non-revenue-generating. I'll publish them at least in MP3 format, and maybe Ogg if I can get a good encoder. I have a feeling that if I publish Ogg, it's not going to get downloaded very much, but it'll be interesting to see.

At least help advertize Ogg. Can't hurt. BTW what is wrong with the xiph.org's ogg encoder?

Almost anything can be killed with patents

Copyright is all about copying the work. Patents are about copying the idea.

That's part of what's inherently wrong with patenting software. They should treat patents in the same way they treat trademarks -- if its use becomes diluted and unchecked, it belongs to the public.

MP3, GIF and lots of other data formats are just out there everywhere and should belong to the public at large. It's not like the someone who invented LZ or MP3 formats woke up from a coma after 20 years of people using their work. The people have been using it for so long, it belongs to the people now.

People should be protesting and presuring for the release of these patents. People should be protesting against software patents in general. When it comes to historical and archival data, it's all about the format.

What would happen if MS patented EVERYTHING they did. Screw copyright -- just patented everything. We know their legal team would pose a deadly threat to everyone they came in contact with whether the claims had merit or not.

Software patents have a chilling effect on industrial and recreational software development. (Open source is largly recreational... and we should all be screaming for our rights to free expression and recreation.) They need to be officially disposed of. What political force is already supporting this view? I don't know... someone tell me. Whoever and whatever it is, they need to be backed by our support to make some change happen. Things have been out of control for far too long.

Reencode to OGG.

Or another lossless, free-as-in-speech format. When OGG 1.0 came out a couple months ago, I took the plunge and re-ripped all my CDs. (Lucky me, I only have about 80 CDs.)

Even if such a change as this (removing the exemption for personal-use decoders) wouldn't really affect me, there's such a thing as taking a stand against those who would abuse the rights they are granted.

If you can, switch to OGG. Rip all your new CDs in OGG. Encourage gaming companies to use the OGG format for the music in their games. And so on.

Hold the phone.

From their own site [mp3licensing.com]:

Q. Do I need a license to stream mp3/mp3PRO encoded content over the Internet?

Yes. A license is needed for commercial (i.e., revenue-generating) use of mp3 / mp3PRO in real time broadcasting (terrestrial, satellite, cable and/or any other media), broadcasting / streaming via Internet, intranets and/or other networks or in other electronic content distribution systems, such as pay-audio or audio-on-demand applications.

However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.(emphasis mine)

Does this mean that open source free ware is still...well...free??

So let's buy a license!

If I understand the terms, if we can gather together $50,000, we could buy a license for an LGPL MP3 library, to which our applications could link.

I'd be willing to pay $100 towards the cause.

To save you some time...

Here's what Freshmeat has to offer in Mp3->Ogg converters :

Oggasm [freshmeat.net]
mp32ogg [freshmeat.net]
Mp3 to Vorbis [freshmeat.net]

This is aimed at OGG

This won't kill -- or probably even hurt -- the MP3 format. It's too entrenched. What it will do is make it harder to release Free players that support MP3. And which players have the best support for OGG? That's right, the Free ones. So if this succeeds in making it harder to distribute Free players, it reduces the number of available OGG players.

Since no one will want a player that can't handle OGG, the only remaining players with significant market share will be those that have paid the fees. The organizations that can afford the fees mostly have a vested interest in restricting distribution.

Now that I've finally gotten a chance to comment..

It's probably to late since there's so many and mine will get lost.. but here it goes..

First off, like somebody said, this has always been the case, but there was no enforcement. So it's really not new.. As far as hardware players, a LOT of them use chips made by other companies (like TI or whatever). Now, I would think that TI would have to pay, not the company selling the MP3 players made with the device.. so then they charge the company making the player with their device an extra $0.75 and so on until you pay when you get the player. And being such a big company like TI or the others that make MP3 decoding chips, I would think they would have worked out patent stuff before, and since they were charging (just not enforcing) I bet that this is already happening.

The real bind is when it comes to software, and they've been doing this with encoding, and stuff like BLADE and LAME are still around and kicking, so I don't see why things like XMMS and mpeg123 would be effected.. I think RedHat's move is silly, but that's just me.

Xiph's reply

The guys over at Xiph.org have posted a reply, in the form of a highly sarcastic open letter [xiph.org] to Thompson. :)

So that's why JMF went missing?

Sun pulled downloads of the Java Media Framework [sun.com] last week because of an undisclosed "licensing issue". Wonder if this it.

Guess there's no point promoting my open-source shoutcast/icecast support for JMF [sourceforge.net] anymore. Damn. Almost topped 20 downloads.

--realinvalidname

FUD ahoy!

Yeesh, this thread is full of such bullshit, it's ridiculous.

Now, kiddies, can we please understand the *real* significance of this?

Point #1: it's not actually clear how new all this is. I've been looking at the relevant page with the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) and it seems from that that the current terms came in in August 2001, which hardly makes this news.

But, for the moment, let's assume this is NEW and EXCITING! What's changed?

Well, for a long time, Fraunhofer have charged patent royalty for all MP3 encoders and all non-freely distributed MP3 decoders. This means there is exactly zero difference for your hardware MP3 player and any software MP3 player which costs money; the makers of these will have already been paying these (minuscule) patent royalties since they started manufacturing the device.

The change (if it *is* a new development) is that there used to be an exemption for freely-distributed MP3 decoders. Now there isn't. This means that to distribute such players you need to purchase a license for the distribution from the patent holder.

The charges they are asking, in commercial terms, are *peanuts*. AOL, owners of Nullsoft who publish Winamp, can pay a flat fee of $50k to be able to distribute Winamp with MP3 decoding capability forever. They no doubt already have. $50k is absolutely NOTHING to AOL, it probably came out of petty cash. Same goes for Microsoft (WMP) and Apple (iTunes or whatever).

To you as an end-user the impact of this is precisely zero. If you use a freely downloaded MP3 encoder in the US you're almost certainly already breaking patent legislation; no-one seems to care about doing this, and certainly no-one's going to try and arrest you for it. Most people use iTunes, WMP or WinAmp to play their audio anyway; as mentioned already, the owners of these will have paid their patent fees already and it's perfectly legal to do so. (By the by, you can't send Fraunhofer 75 cents to pay for your usage of some decoder; that's what the $15k minimum payment is about. These terms are exclusively aimed at publishers, that's how patent law works; the publisher pays the patent royalty and passes the cost on to the consumer, somehow. You don't pay it yourself directly.)

So all this doesn't matter two fucks as far as you personally are concerned, as far as people who use WMP, iTunes or Winamp are concerned, and as far as encoding MP3s is concerned.

THE ONLY SIGNIFICANT EFFECT OF THIS "NEWS" IS ON POOR COMPANIES WHO DISTRIBUTE FREE MP3 DECODERS. i.e. - Linux distribution vendors.

As mentioned, to Microsoft, Apple or AOL, $50k is peanuts. To SuSE, Mandrake, or Debian, it's not necessarily. Plus, for Linux distributors, there's an ancillary problem. Linux vendors generally license their product as being freely redistributable; when you download Mandrake you can perfectly legally then pass it on to someone else. The terms of the patent license you can buy for MP3s wouldn't allow this; even if Mandrake or Debian or Red Hat purchased a license to distribute an MP3 decoder they couldn't legally distribute it under a license which allowed it to be freely redistributed.

So the big problem is for Linux vendors. They're faced with a dilemma. They have several possible options. 1, carry on as before and hope they don't get prosecuted for patent infringement, out of the goodness of Fraunhofer's heart. 2, immediately take all MP3 decoding functionality out of their distribution. 3, buy a patent license and somehow modify the license of their distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality cannot be legally redistributed. 4, somehow fork the distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality is not legally available in countries where Fraunhofer have a patent on MP3 decoding but is available in countries where they don't - remember, there's countries where this whole issue is void because Fraunhofer have no patent. Patent law is national, not international.

There's dirtier options, too. One i've suggested exploits the fact that you can legally distribute the source code to something that infringes patent under US law. (This is why you can legally download the LAME encoder source code in the US). Thus it would probably be legal for distros to remove the binary RPMs for MP3 decoding functionality but include source RPMs and instructions on compiling them, along with a disclaimer stating that it would be illegal to do so in the US.

But I digress. My basic point is a lot of stuff in this thread is silly, frivolous, misinformed, and irrelevant. The big issue of this patent is purely and simply a problem for Linux vendors.

Re:These prices were up last year.

I'm rather certain they used to only demand royalties for encoders, not decoders.

Lawsuit waiting to happen?

Perhaps they are just getting their legal team cracking, and are just waiting for the right time to strike..
Odd, sueing someone over the IP of something that has caused more IP problems than anything else in history.

this IS a change from before

These prices have always been around. It's just that they have never been enforced.

Wrong. Or, rather, right, but wrong with respect to a very technical point that has escaped notice so far.

Previously decoders which were released for free for personal use were exempt [debian.org] from the licensing fees. This covers winamp, xmms, mpg123, and all the other free software players you love.

That exemption has been removed. Now everything costs 75 cents, no matter whether it's free software or not. And that, my friend, is a big deal.

Re:These prices were up last year.

These prices have always been around. It's just that they have never been enforced. If everyone had to pay for a player to listen to mp3's, mp3's would be nowhere near as popular as they are today.
This is just another case of /. editors making news out something that's been around for more than a year.

Actually, you are incorrect; the editors did not do anything wrong in this case. While the rates have been around, they were lower previously. Take a look at the previous royalty page courtesy of the Wayback Machine [archive.org].

I also have a feeling that if they are going to increase the rates, they are going to make a point of charging for the royalty fees as well.