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The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
- ggambetta 10y agoI'm curious about what advantages and benefits, if any, the patents brought to Fraunhofer. Other than making mp3 slightly more difficult to work with especially on Linux, did it benefit them in any way? Did them benefit society? Coming at this from an "this is a real-life example of software patents being {good|bad}".
- TD-Linux 10y agoIt made them a lot of money.
- Gaelan 10y agoWere they involved in the creation of MP3?
- kowdermeister 10y agoYes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society#Notable_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society#Notable_pro...
- davidgerard 10y agoKarlheinz Brandenburg at Fraunhofer invented MP3. (And AAC.) (edit: not Stockhausen, thank you!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Brandenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Brandenburg
- kken 10y agoKarlheinz Brandenburg... Stockhausen was a composer.
- kken 10y agoThey developed MP3.
- Tomte 10y agoMoney, of course. All kind of companies (including megacorps) paid for it. Even some private individuals like me (I think the company was called Fluendo?)
- poizan42 10y agoThe licensing money have probably helped the Fraunhofer Society do more research. Now whether that is the way you think research should be founded, and whether the net cost to society has been larger than the gain is another question.
- detaro 10y agoFor context, Fraunhofer Society is a massive public-benefit organisation aimed at applied research: while it gets some public funding, that public funding is given according to how much they make in industry contracts, which are the primary source of income. The idea behind this model is that they have room to do work that's not immediately profitable, but on the other hand have to keep applications in mind and work effectively to still get industry work.
- quadrangle 10y agoThere's no real-life example of software patents being good.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoI'm down on software patents too, but I'm not sure that's supportable without at least some sort of argument.
- quadrangle 10y agoGiven that the fundamental concept of software patents is bad, not only in principle but in practice, there's burden on anyone suggesting the good/bad question to validate that it's even a legitimate question. It's like the creationism/evolution "debate". I can simply say that there's no validity at all to the creationism arguments without providing any argument at all. Similar to the idea that I don't need to provide an argument to reject any other sort of baseless idea of false equivalence or unwarranted appeal to agnosticism.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoIf your premise is that "patents are not good" then why even ask the question about software patents? It's rather disingenuous, the assumption with the structure of your question is "within the framework of 'patents can be good'".
- quadrangle 10y agoWell, I indeed do not believe that patents are actually good, but there's far more merit to the unconvincing arguments that patents can be good than to any arguments that software patents can be good. There are good reasons that many people (particularly among those who understand software) fundamentally oppose the entire concept of software patents without opposing all patents.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago"I'm obviously right, so there" is not an argument. If you want to convince a poor foolish Philistine like myself, you need to actually discuss your evidence and conclusions.
- mljoe 10y agoFraunhofer got paid lots of money from big companies buying patent licenses. Since they are a non-profit institution dedicated to scientific research, almost everything they make finds its way back into funding scientific research. That said, we shouldn't generalize Fraunhofer's economics to the rest of the software industry. If it was just this kind of thing I would have zero problems with it. But we should be suspicious of software patents because the patent system implicitly rewards ideas that are broad (more things a patent touches, more $$$) and non-inventive (less work to come up with a patent, more $$$). Patents can be dangerous to human progress, and the patent system encourages patents that are. A broad patent could hold a whole industry hostage for 20 years, which is an eternity in technology. I sympathize more with folks who want to get rid of the whole thing for this reason.
- freehunter 10y agoThe relevant quote: >On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated. Does this mean that you can't get a license for MP3 anymore, or are they trying to say you don't need a license anymore? Are they opening it up, or are they shutting it down?
- vetinari 10y agoYou don't need licensing for mp3 decoding anymore. All the patents have expired. Even Fedora ships mp3 decoder now. There are still patents left for mp3 encoding though.
- poizan42 10y agoThe last known decoding patent expired in 2015. That last known patent covering mp3 at all expired two weeks ago. Edit: apparently there are two patents left in relations to encoder optimizations[0] not mentioned on the wikipedia pages. Those are probably irrelevant to modern encoders on modern computers. [0]: https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/0/05/mp3patent/ https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/0/05/mp3pat...
- vetinari 10y agoFedora wiki says: > However, as of 2016-11-10, Fedora is now able to include MP3 decoding functionality. MP3 encoding functionality is still not permissible, because it requires patented technologies and the patent holder has not provided licenses that are compatible with Fedora's requirements. So it looks like there are some patents relevant to modern encoders.
- poizan42 10y agoIt probably hasn't been updated within the last two weeks... Edit: The wiki page[0] links to the Fraunhofer page[1] saying that the licensing program has been terminated... [0]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/MP3 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/MP3 [1]: http://www.mp3licensing.com/ http://www.mp3licensing.com/ which redirects to https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audi...
- derefr 10y agoSo, now that the "but MP3 is patent-encumbered" consideration is finally dead-ish, what's the new balance on the debate between shipping {MP3, MP4-AAC, MKV-Vorbis, MKV-Opus} as music/SFX assets in software products? Also, with the two sub-considerations: • on mobile, where hardware decoding exists for only some codecs; • on the web, where the audio APIs only accept some of these formats/codecs.
- TD-Linux 10y agoMP3 is the worst performer of the lot, but is suddenly more attractive because it's free and AAC is decidedly not. If you don't need compatibility (like for bgm/sfx) it's still a worse choice than Vorbis or Opus because it compresses worse. For sfx and looping music in particular, mp3 is also a mess because there's no standard way to play back samples with zero delay and zero extra samples at the end.
- bastawhiz 10y agoMp3 is also really accessible. Anyone who's ever worked with audio in an amateur capacity knows how to create an mp3. I don't think many people would know how to properly encode an Opus file. I did an informal survey on Quora a while back, and I was surprised to see that almost every audio industry professional had no idea what Opus even was. Mp3 is, for all intents and purposes, the animated gif of audio.
- derefr 10y agoOn the other hand, due to the encoder patent, most FOSS audio-editing tools ship without MP3-encoding support included. My first instinct, on being asked to create an MP3 from a WAV + some effects, is to download Audacity, diddle around, and then export to MP3. But—and I always forget the first time I do it—you have to download an additional LAME plugin for Audacity to get that MP3-export to happen. On the other hand, Opus is just right there in the Export menu; the codec is built into the app. (On Macs, AAC is also "right there" in Audacity's export menu, due to OS-native Quicktime encoding support; but on other OSes AAC export requires similar fiddling to MP3 export.) And, mind you, this isn't nearly as much of a concern on Linux, where usually the app package will have optional dependencies on the MP3/AAC encoder libraries, and so—if you have your "non-free" package repositories enabled—they'll get installed along with the software.
- notaplumber 10y agoRecognizing this adds legitimacy to software patents. Don't. There have been free and open source MP3 decoders for many years now.
- JohnJamesRambo 10y agoSo you don't believe in software patents?
- tombert 10y agoSoftware patents historically have been awarded for incredibly vague, "could-apply-to-nearly-anything" systems. As a result, there have been a lot of abuses of software patents by companies, both big and small.
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- pdeuchler 10y agoAll software can be reduced to mathematical formulae, which cannot be patented, so no. There should be no such thing as a software patent.
- a3n 10y agoI'm very sympathetic to the idea of disallowing software patents; to my layman's sensibilities, so many of them are ridiculous, or after the fact grants of something that has been done in practice for years, or predatory, or all that and more. However, any physical machine or process can be reduced to the laws of physics, and you can't patent the laws of physics as far as I know. I don't think "reduced to mathematical formulae" is in itself a great argument. Should the jacquard loom have been granted a patent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom https://www.google.com/patents/US578068 https://www.google.com/patents/US578068
- dangayle 10y agoDoes this mean that there should be no more need for Audacity to download the MP3 encoder from sourceforge?
- brink 10y agoOr pretty much any free music related software?
- dandelion_lover 10y agoSo is the FSF's campaign "Play Ogg!" [0] slowly becoming obsolete? [0] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/playogg/en/ https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/playogg/en/
- 013a 10y agoLike most of the FSF.
- _delirium 10y agoRoughly in the way the "Burn All GIFs" [1] campaign became obsolete: the patents expired, removing the original objection, but nonetheless alternative formats are now better anyway. [1] http://burnallgifs.org/archives/ http://burnallgifs.org/archives/
- yuhong 10y agoPNG ended up being supported better than Vorbis/Opus though.
- floatboth 10y agoSure, PNG instantly took over as the lossless non-animated format, but Animated PNG is still not widely supported (Firefox only IIRC?) Mostly the "auto-playing animations without audio" stuff is moving to videos, e.g. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/autoplay https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/autoplay
- BIackSwan 10y agoI highly recommend "How Music Got Free" for an entertaining and illuminating read of MP3 and how it changed the world - for the better or worse. It also delves into how Fraunhofer (and its creator) benefited monetarily from its adoption. Link - https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession-ebook/dp/B00OZ0TKL6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493669213&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession-ebook/dp...
- deathspin 10y agothis website needs more 1px lines.
- spacemanmatt 10y ago1 is abstract. 0 is abstract. Software is abstract. We reserve copyright for such works, but software is strictly patent-ineligible.
- CalChris 10y agoSoftware falls under Process which is one of the four patentable subject matters for utility patents: Process, Machine, Manufacture and Composition of Matter. So software is patentable in the United States. However, software can also fall under the abstract idea exception and thus not be patentable. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2106.html https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2106.html Enfish LLC v Microsoft is the most important recent case. In its decision, the Supreme Court suggested that claims purporting to improve the functioning of the computer itself, or improving an existing technological process might not succumb to the abstract idea exception. http://www.patentdocs.org/2016/05/enfish-llc-v-microsoft-corp-fed-cir-2016.html http://www.patentdocs.org/2016/05/enfish-llc-v-microsoft-cor... That's your dividing line. My guess is that Fraunhofer's MP3 patents improve a technological process and are valid.
- deepnotderp 10y agoScrew it, let's switch to neural network based compression algorithms...
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- donatj 10y agoAm I free to use MP3 now? Or am I still restricted and they won't sell me the rights to use it?
- ksec 10y agoWith the best MP3 encoder, most music @ 256Kbps are pretty much transparent. Or you can up it to 320Kbps. With the increase of storage capacity, these shouldn't be an issues. But the world has move to streaming.
- midnightclubbed 10y agoSome number of years ago I wrote an mp3 decoder for a game I was working on. It allowed us to put hours of speech onto our 16Mb N64 cartridge (yep, it was quite a few years ago). Knowing we had to get a mp3 license I contacted Fraunhofer who decided that a console game required a hardware decoding license which ran at $10,000s (if we had been a PC title it would have been a few $100 as I remember). Legal got involved and decided they would license Rad Games Tool's Miles audio (since it already had a mp3 license and they could take any heat from Fraunhofer!). Unfortunately for me legal then made me completely wipe the first implementation, carefully optimized N64 RSP vector code and all, and do a clean re-write of everything. We didn't use a single line of the Miles code, but they got a license fee and we had happy lawyers.
- juskrey 10y agoDid you consider Ogg Vorbis?
- themodelplumber 10y agoOgg and Vorbis hadn't yet discovered one another back in the N64 days, had they?
- kevindong 10y agoGiven that the N64 was released in the North America in September 1996 and that the first stable release of Vorbis wasn't released until May 2000, it's very probable that OP couldn't have considered/used Vorbis.
- juskrey 10y agoOh, ok. I thought "few years" was meaning actually few years. Did not know much about N64. After googling, it seems devs were still active in 2003-2005.
- midnightclubbed 10y agoIt was probably 1999 that I wrote the first version. Ogg was still in development at that point. I know I considered a few codecs but mp3 was relatively well supported with 'reference' codecs.
- glennos 10y ago"We thank all of our licensees for their great support in making mp3 the defacto audio codec in the world". This doesn't make sense. Defacto standard?
- matt4077 10y agode jure: Standard prescribed by law de facto: Standard, because it's what everyone does, without any coordinating entity d'ISO: Standard set by standard-setting body.
- nurettin 10y agoEe re re re e ed r e f Rd dx F did d
- nurettin 10y agoSorry HN, child got the phone.
- bigbugbag 10y agoFunny how they fail to mention patent free better audio codec such as vorbis or flac which became a thing folowwing decision of licensing mp3 20 years ago. But they did not miss the opportunity to cite AAC which is patented and has to be licensed for certain uses.