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This is a great piece and deserves to be revisited from time to time - it shows how much journalism is actually just PR for for-profit companies. The most insa

by rjst01 3y ago

This is a great piece and deserves to be revisited from time to time - it shows how much journalism is actually just PR for for-profit companies. The most insane thing about this is that none of the patents specify enough detail to actually implement MP3 - the official specifications are behind lock and key, and can no longer be purchased for any price. Unless they leak from someone who had a license, the public will never get to see them. For all intents and purposes, the LAME source code is now the official specification for MP3.

goodluckchuck 3y ago
> none of the patents specify enough detail to actually implement MP3 So, it was never a valid patent to begin with.
- hoseja 3y ago
  Unlike other software patents?
- Retric 3y ago
  No, you misunderstood what parents are for. Patents only cover the non obvious details to do some very specific thing. They aren’t CAD drawings with every detail specified, so you may be able to make a windshield wiper from one but it wouldn’t be a drop in replacement for a specific vehicle’s windshield wiper, in fact multiple different designs can all fall under the same patent. The existence of multiple MP3 related patents makes it clear it’s not simply implementing a single idea. So you may be able to make a similar compression algorithm, but it wouldn’t be MP3.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
l33tman 3y ago
I remember fondly that I did a masters thesis back in 1997 implementing an MP3 decoder on a 40 MIPS DSP, that was also network connected. It might have been the first networked audio streamer in the world :) But I had to go with their super-unoptimized C-based specification. I did have the MP3 standard to read as well as a reference, and I'm sure it's spread all over the internet and its corners..
ttepasse 3y ago
Extremely minor nitpick: In this case the Fraunhofer Society is a non-profit, although it earns 70% of its income through contracts. That's why I can’t be that angry about the MP3 patent monopoly: The income financed other applied science research of the Fraunhofer Society, and financed research seems better to me than non-financed (and thus non-existant) research. I'm with you with the closed specifications: Those should be definitely open now.
- seanp2k2 3y ago
  Is that not the same logical argument in favor of taxes though, eg property tax to fund schools? I still don't see software patents as a net positive for society, even if some companies are attempting to do some kind of societal good with them, and that logic gets really tenuous IMO with things like this.
RetroTechie 3y ago
Iirc encoding is not exactly specified by design. Leaving implementers (some) degree of freedom on what acoustic models to use, what audio data to throw away, etc. This is one area where LAME lagged in its early days (not today). How a decoder should work is exactly defined (a quick look on Wikipedia mentions ISO/IEC 11172-3, not sure if that's a free/open standard or not). So one should expect 1:1 correspondence between encoded stream and decoded sound (minus rounding errors?), regardless of decoder used. For already-encoded MP3s in people's archives this doesn't matter anyway, as the loss in "lossy compression" was already eaten, and no amount of re-coding or bitrates can recover that. Transcoding = more loss. Not to mention the hassles involved in transcoding, likely for little gain if any.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
I did an experiment recently where I managed to read all the english language investigative journalism worldwide, produced in the preceding week and indexed via a search engine, in just a few hours. Even though there are literally over a billion people that can write English across the entire planet, and probably a few hundred thousand journalists active at any given time. Very very little is actually published in any given week.
- senkora 3y ago
  Do you have any information on how you did that? I am curious. I used to read the Wikipedia current events portal to get a relatively unfiltered stream of world news: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    I just cross referenced the major search engines with a normal search query.

by rjst01 3y ago

goodluckchuck 3y ago

> none of the patents specify enough detail to actually implement MP3 So, it was never a valid patent to begin with.

hoseja 3y ago
Unlike other software patents?
Retric 3y ago
No, you misunderstood what parents are for. Patents only cover the non obvious details to do some very specific thing. They aren’t CAD drawings with every detail specified, so you may be able to make a windshield wiper from one but it wouldn’t be a drop in replacement for a specific vehicle’s windshield wiper, in fact multiple different designs can all fall under the same patent. The existence of multiple MP3 related patents makes it clear it’s not simply implementing a single idea. So you may be able to make a similar compression algorithm, but it wouldn’t be MP3.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

l33tman 3y ago

I remember fondly that I did a masters thesis back in 1997 implementing an MP3 decoder on a 40 MIPS DSP, that was also network connected. It might have been the first networked audio streamer in the world :) But I had to go with their super-unoptimized C-based specification. I did have the MP3 standard to read as well as a reference, and I'm sure it's spread all over the internet and its corners..

ttepasse 3y ago

Extremely minor nitpick: In this case the Fraunhofer Society is a non-profit, although it earns 70% of its income through contracts. That's why I can’t be that angry about the MP3 patent monopoly: The income financed other applied science research of the Fraunhofer Society, and financed research seems better to me than non-financed (and thus non-existant) research. I'm with you with the closed specifications: Those should be definitely open now.

seanp2k2 3y ago
Is that not the same logical argument in favor of taxes though, eg property tax to fund schools? I still don't see software patents as a net positive for society, even if some companies are attempting to do some kind of societal good with them, and that logic gets really tenuous IMO with things like this.

RetroTechie 3y ago

Iirc encoding is not exactly specified by design. Leaving implementers (some) degree of freedom on what acoustic models to use, what audio data to throw away, etc. This is one area where LAME lagged in its early days (not today). How a decoder should work is exactly defined (a quick look on Wikipedia mentions ISO/IEC 11172-3, not sure if that's a free/open standard or not). So one should expect 1:1 correspondence between encoded stream and decoded sound (minus rounding errors?), regardless of decoder used. For already-encoded MP3s in people's archives this doesn't matter anyway, as the loss in "lossy compression" was already eaten, and no amount of re-coding or bitrates can recover that. Transcoding = more loss. Not to mention the hassles involved in transcoding, likely for little gain if any.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

I did an experiment recently where I managed to read all the english language investigative journalism worldwide, produced in the preceding week and indexed via a search engine, in just a few hours. Even though there are literally over a billion people that can write English across the entire planet, and probably a few hundred thousand journalists active at any given time. Very very little is actually published in any given week.

senkora 3y ago
Do you have any information on how you did that? I am curious. I used to read the Wikipedia current events portal to get a relatively unfiltered stream of world news: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  I just cross referenced the major search engines with a normal search query.