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Modern OSs provide such an API for playing audio and video, and some (ie. Mac OS and Windows) even provide licensed proprietary codecs... not to mention that OS-provided codecs often work with things like video drivers to provide hardware acceleration that is transparent to applications.

Canonical licenses both MP3 audio and H.264 video for its OEM partners: which may help to explain why the Ubuntu Linux PC has some presence and visibility on retail shelves.

Licensed Companies, AVC/H.264 Licensees

You should check the very careful wording in their own description of the license.

Let's start with basics: if you want to see actual license terms, you have to ask pretty-please will they send you a hardcopy. A unique, one-off artifact sent specifically to you.

When most companies offer a summary of a license, they include language like "while this description is believed to be a fair summary of the terms of the agreement, in the event of any discrepancy the text of the actual license must prevail".

MPEG-LA says its description "may not be relied upon for any purpose." Full stop.

You could call noticing that perhaps-excessive paranoia on my part, or wording it that way perhaps-excessive paranoia on theirs. It's worth considering.

So let's look at the details. I don't care about the viewer-pays scenarios, let's look at the ad- or donation- or plain old volunteer-supported scenarios.

For TV, if they're going to charge at all, they're going to charge either a one-time fee of $2,500 per encoder or recurring fees that start at $2,500/yr until you start getting into millions of reachable viewers. Very reasonable for even an indie TV station or the like.

No royalties at all on videos 12 minutes or less.

For service over the capital-I Internet, if viewers pay no fee (and if there's some unavoidable and ~no more than nominal~ fee they say they can probably arrange to treat that as no fee) to receive the video, there's no license fee either.

That last is new as of about five months ago; for the first ~90% of their existence they explicitly intended to charge you fees even if you weren't charging your audience any. Good luck getting $2500 in ad revenue on your blog.

So why did it take them seven years to momentarily give up on the attempt? They explicitly state they're going to revisit this issue next round: they intend to charge for it if they think they can get away with it. Why would they even consider that? Do they really believe they deserve an extra special tip for so clearly showing us your zits?

Why does MPEG-LA not say, as Thomson does for MP3,

Note: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 associated annual gross revenue less ahan US$100 000.00

[Thompson says that about MP3. MPEG-LA refuses to say that about H.264]

Google's taking a big hit to do what they're doing. It's true that H.264 currently has the best of the contending encoders, and probably the best hardware and industry support. It's difficult (not to say impossible) to believe they'd do this purely to kick MPEG-LA to the curb for this -- it's almost laughably low-grade moneygrubbing -- but that's certainly one effect of what they're doing, and there's not much else apparent in the license.

Except for one thing: mpla also say they might unilaterally eliminate their caps on yearly royalty payments.

Yeah. I have to believe Google might just be doing this just because a world in which they don't have to do business with these people is that much better than a world in which they do.

What, like this:

mp3 is not free..
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html

h.264 is not free:
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html

mpeg2 is not free:
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Pages/Agreement.aspx

(how do I make a proper link here - without the whole url showing up?)

You check the button in the install process, Canoncial doesn't. With preinstalls it would be the OEM installing it for you, which makes the OEM a lawsuit target

Canonical licenses mp3 and H.264 for its OEM distributions:

Licensed Companies, Licensees - PC Applications
  AVC/H.264 Licensees

Walmart.com had 212 flavors of the Win 7 laptop and 95 Win 7 desktops on sale this holiday season - and all sold with licensed mp3 audio and DVD video play out of the box.

You check the button in the install process, Canoncial doesn't. With preinstalls it would be the OEM installing it for you, which makes the OEM a lawsuit target

Canonical licenses mp3 and H.264 for its OEM distributions:

Licensed Companies, Licensees - PC Applications
  AVC/H.264 Licensees

Walmart.com had 212 flavors of the Win 7 laptop and 95 Win 7 desktops on sale this holiday season - and all sold with licensed mp3 audio and DVD video play out of the box.

But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?

That. MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason. We currently have to choose between two kludges, badly implemented possibilities, one of them being open. The choice is easy to make.

I'm pretty sure the MP3 compression algorithm is not open. These folks make a nice bundle of money from it. A little more background information is available here. Rates and fees are covered here.
I don't know if The Fraunhofer Society is "for profit", but it would seem they co-own the rights to MP3 and via Thomson Consumer Electronics, they do collect money for it's use.

I thought at first that themp3 standard was already "free":

Open standard. Developed by the Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG), Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information.

However, mp3 is not free...yet. Some of these patents are set to expire on their 20 year time frame in a couple of years it would seem.

This is the point.

Please see MP3 Royalty Rates. MP3 music sold requires 2% royalty payment.

In addition, MP3-related lawsuits were still raging in the legal world. (Example 1)

In contrast, for AAC, "No licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format."

Sure, but legally it's a grey area - and if a company produced a box that did mp3, I'm sure Fraunhofer would jump on them for licence fees.

At some point, either the distro or the sponsoring company would have to fork out the cost for the mp3 licence.

From the Fraunhofer licence site, it's US$ 0.75 per unit, and a minimum of US$ 15K a year.

Ok. CDs cost money to produce, but the article is dated, and I think a more interesting question with respect to the cost of music is "how do the costs translate to online sales?" I am clearly guessing here, but if anyone else has real numbers, please reply. Given that everyone likes to talk about Radiohead's "In Rainbows", I'll base my estimates on that. The album has 10 songs, so...

Online Distribution (10 songs / CD)

$0.17 - Musicians' unions - no change
$0.22 - Packaging/manufacturing - 2% of revenue to license mp3 format for content distribution, AAC is free for distribution, don't know about Fairplay DRM.
$0.82 - Publishing royalties - no change
$1.00 - Retail profit - 12 @ $.10/song
$0.10 - Distribution - Bandwidth ~5MB/song (downloaded from Radiohead) = 50 MB * 0.0005/MB=$.025 (the estimate is for Video on Demand, but that's all I could find). I bumped it up a little to cover hardware maintenance.
$1.60 - Artists' royalties - no change
$1.70 - Label profit - no change
$2.40 - Marketing/promotion - no change
$2.91 - Label overhead - no change
$0.00 - Retail overhead - not sure

Total: $10.92

Apple sells "In Rainbows" for $9.99. Amazon sells it for $7.99 as a download. I don't believe Apple loses money on downloads. I'm not sure about Amazon. While this is strictly hypothetical, it would seem the difference between a $15 CD and a $10 downloaded album is more than just the cost of production and distribution of the CD. Assuming I'm not totally off on my numbers, and the numbers that aren't related to production and distribution do not change, it should not be possible for Apple to sell the record for $10 or Amazon for $8. I believe the pricing model must allow for online retailers to make a profit, so what makes up the difference? Are the labels giving up profits? Are they operating more efficiently than they used to?

The ogg folks sent them the source so they could see for themselves if anything patented was being used, and told them to put up or shut up. Fahnhoffer shut up. I think that says it all.

Whether this is true or not, all it says is the Ogg Vorbis format doesn't use any code patented by Fraunhofer. Xiph could still hold their own patents on the Ogg Vorbis format.

What I fail to understand is that since ogg is the audibly superior method, and its free, whyinhell are the record companies even thinking of using mp3 with its 5 and 6 digit per song licensing fees? The total lack of anything resembling good business sense in the RIAA/MPAA world boggles the mind.

Probably because every media player, both hardware and software, can play mp3s. Only a handful can play Ogg Vorbis, and more importantly, the two most popular ones (WMP and iTunes/iPod) can't. And, mp3 licensing fees are significantly lower than you claim, and they are levied against codecs, software, streams, etc., not against songs.

3) Reimplement the required code, distribute only in countries with a more enlightened attitude towards software patents (eg the EU)

Here's the mp3 patent list. I see a lot of listings for Germany, France, Spain, UK...

What's the deal?

*head explodes* You are a fucking retarded. You have to license the algorithms to decode mp3 - the patents have not been shown to be too broad in court, so until they are, you need to pay or sue - ignoring the issue is not an option in bussiness jesus fucking christ. Not that it's even that expensive.
Licensing rates - as low as $0.75

Get your head out of your opensource ass, if Linux wants to play in the business world, you have to pay licensing for technologies that are NOT open source that your customers want. If you don't understand that, then you need to grow the fuck up.

sure it was a little Trollish, but it's still true.

*head explodes*
You are a fucking retarded. You have to license the algorithms to decode mp3 - the patents have not been shown to be too broad in court, so until they are, you need to pay or sue - ignoring the issue is not an option in bussiness jesus fucking christ. Not that it's even that expensive.
Licensing rates - as low as $0.75

Get your head out of your opensource ass, if Linux wants to play in the business world, you have to pay licensing for technologies that are NOT open source that your customers want. If you don't understand that, then you need to grow the fuck up.

"Most distributions" have always ignored the whole mp3 patent thing. It wasn't until redhat said "oh shi- we better ditch all the mp3 support" back around rh5 or 6 or so that anyone cared, and then the extent of debian's caring was removing lame and suggesting people use toolame (mp2 encoder) (During all of this, it was the company's stated position that non-commercial mp3 players did not require a license [this riled Debian, since technically they were unable to legally pass that guarantee on since Frauenhofer could have changed their position at any time, but they decided that they could remove the mp3 players if it became necessary to], only the encoders. It is worth noting that at this point http://www.mp3licensing.com/ does not show any kind of decoder exemption, only an exemption on streaming music for non-commercial or small-revenue purposes).

According to mp3licensing.com, the rates are assessed per copy of the codec and decoder. It looks like it would cost about $3-4 per copy. The OS doesn't factor into it.

dvdcca.org is not so forthcoming about the cost of their licenses, though the FAQ on that page specifically discusses Linux: "The DVD Copy Control Association would welcomes [sic] applications for the legal use of CSS from all manufacturers. In fact, Sigma Designs (www.sigmadesigns.com) is now marketing a DVD player for Linux under its license to manufacture products using CSS." I glanced quickly at the sigmadesigns page, but all I saw was hardware.

The fees for Windows Media aren't very high, especially in comparison to MP3. They look to run about $0.25 per copy.

Even if we're talking about another $25 per computer for licensing fees, I'd be happy to pay that to have legal software. Unlike some other people here, I wouldn't be buying an OEM Linux computer to avoid the so-called "Microsoft tax." Once you factor in the fact that the OEM won't be collecting additional fees for including trialware, and you add in some money for licensing, my guess is you'll end up with a price not that different from a machine that comes with Window. My interest is in having OEMs provide machines with pre-installed Linux that works flawlessly when they arrive and for which support is available on the same terms as Windows machines. Despite my initial hopes that Dell would be providing that experience with its Ubuntu machines, that doesn't appear to be the reality.

The license in question is for the software developer/manufacturer. There isn't any redistribution of licenses involved. The license also (as far as I can tell from official sources) covers all patents in all countries.

In other words, if Ubuntu pays for a license, there is no issue with where anybody lives. Ubuntu will have the right to distribute MP3 decoders to any country.

I suggest you take a look at http://mp3licensing.com/help/developers.html

The UK does recognise software patents; check out http://mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html for a list to start with.

Even if we didn't recognise software patents, there is still the problem that libdvdcss is made illegal by our implementation of the EUCD.

No matter whether the system sucks or not, if this had stood, quite a few other companies would have been subject to the same kind of payout. I think someone below posted this link to a list: Click to read.

On that list are IBM, Linspire and Sun. The original decision was bad for everyone, though it obviously didn't knock you off your pedestal.

Yes because if it wasn't overturned then one of these might be next when Alcatel runs out of money: http://mp3licensing.com/licensees/index.asp

Um, the non Free (as in freedom, not price) MP3 packages aren't infringement. MP3 patents (and as far as I know, most multimedia patents) are set up with a royalty basis. The people that own MP3 are quite happy to let you obtain free ones, because it standardizes the format, and lets them get a royalty out of MP3 players and windows.

IANAL, and I do not know about all multimedia patents, I've only looked closely at MP3

Um, the non Free (as in freedom, not price) MP3 packages aren't infringement. MP3 patents (and as far as I know, most multimedia patents) are set up with a royalty basis. The people that own MP3 are quite happy to let you obtain free ones, because it standardizes the format, and lets them get a royalty out of MP3 players and windows.

IANAL, and I do not know about all multimedia patents, I've only looked closely at MP3

How is the Fluendo decoder (not codec, since it doesn't encode) free from patent trouble? The licensing is per application, not per decoder. Otherwise, there probably would've been a drive to get a fully licensed (but still open source) decoder under Linux. Debian Etch lets you play MP3s out of the box, BTW. I guess we'll wait to see if the lawyers start targeting the U.S. Debian mirrors.

No encoders are included, however. That appears to be the real issue. Even if the implementation is completely different, they basically claim that the act of making an MP3 is covered by patents. The licensing terms are far reaching though and the whole thing seems like a money grab. They want money for streaming MP3 content (for profit) as well. It would be nice if a lawyer could explain how patents could possibly cover the streaming of user created content.

IIRC, anyone is allowed to take the standard, write a codec for it, and play mp3s as much as they like, legally, for either a royalty fee per copy or US $50 000. The license fees are here. (When it says US $2.50 - $5.00 per unit I presume it's per copy of the codec, not per song).

I believe the technical term is "RAND" (Reasonable and Non Discriminatory) licensing: Thomson S.A and the Fraunhofer Institute are playing nice, they don't refuse anyone who wants to license their invention (they have that monopoly right because it's a patent), and they don't change their mind about the license price when they don't like you (they have that monopoly right because it's a patent).

There's only one catch, that RAND doesn't resonate with F/LOSS software at all.

This is why it matters that standards are not only open but that also RAND is out of the question if you want to allow FLOSS to use your patented standard; Suppose you ask a license fee of only $5.00 per copy of the software distributed, who's going to pay it? Licenses such as the FSF's GPL state that (paragraph 10 GPL3)

You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.

But, you want everyone who copies your program to pay you the $5.00 so you can pay Thomson back their rightful royalties! Do you see the problem? Suddenly you need an administration organisation to count who has downloaded the FLOSS program. And you are not allowed to sanction them if they don't comply because the license forbids you that. And you'd need to monitor everyone who downloaded it to see whether they copy the program further (which is their right by the GPL anyway) otherwise YOU piss off Thomson. etc. etc. It's a nightmare.

This is why there are no legal GPL'ed mp3 players. Incidentally, I think this is also why some British linux and mac users complain that the BBC wants to use a proprietary video standard which they can't be allowed to play.

Think about using Ogg/Vorbis and Ogg/Theora, will you?

Now let's see if we can also tie in the raging ODF - OOXML battle and then this fanboi will shut up :-)

AFAIK, this is why there is such a difference between "real open" data interchange standards such as ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) which is free to use because Sun have made an irrevocable patent pledge that they won't sue anyone ever for implementing ODF, and on the other hand OOXML (ISO *DRAFT* international standard 29500) where Microsoft states that they'll grant a R.a.n.D license for Office XML Schema. So it's all good, you see!

Can you still see under which walnut shell the pea is?
If I'm not horribly mistaken:

Office XML (R.a.n.D licensed)

=

Office 2003 XML

!=

Office 2007 XML

which is

Office Open XML (= nothing to do with OpenOffice.org which uses Open Document Format)

No worries!

I actually think they've amended their ways because on this page it states in quite reasonable terms that Office Open XML 1.0 (ECMA-376) is now a Covered Specification. Still I wouldn't trust it as far as I can throw a printed 6000 page document because on that same page it says:

This promise applies to the identified version of the following specifications. New versions of previously covered specifications will be separately considered for addition to the lis

Since always?

Check out the wikipedia page or the patent licensing page for more info.

Why would you assume it's an ANSI standard and freely available?

The MP3 patents where granted in the mid 1990's. The term of a patent varies between countrys, complicated by the change from 17 years from grant to 20 years from filing date for patents filed after 1994, but basically in another five to ten years the MP3 patents will expire. I can wait.

Also I figure that morally I got a patent license with my hardware mp3 player and I don't see why they should get paid twice when I never use it and my PC at the same time.

Well, if we're redefining "open" to mean "not patented" then you may also strike MP3. Perhaps you were thinking of some definition of free?

I hate to actually put this out there but, If I license my electronic device, see

http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html

Does that mean that I can counter sue the originators of the DMCA for unfairly infringing upon my licensed usage of
the MP3* format with their BS?

RIAA, Go Away!

Well written. I like alternatives. :) Usually makes for good conversation.

However, your proposal has a lot of problems.

1) Who gets to write a summary of the patent? Doesn't the summary stand a good chance of suggesting the answer? "Can you envision a way to make use of the friction energy generated by automobile brakes?" "Uhhhh... sure... I guess you could, uh, charge an electric battery..." (patent)

2) In some cases, recognizing that there even is a problem is the brunt of the invention. "Let's say you have a telegraph. And let's say you have two people who want to communicate in both directions using that telegraph. How might you do that?" (patent)

3) Is this really a good way of determining novelty and non-obviousness? Maybe you just have twelve really stupid or unimaginative reviewers. ;) And what happens if the invention is in such a niche field that you can't find a full 12 experts to review it? What if you can't even find one?

4) Even if you can find twelve reviewers, and even if they do a good job - can you imagine the expense involved? And the delays?

A two or three year duration is the absolute maximum reasonable time for a software patent. Twenty years is laughable. Outside of obscure specialty software like banking systems, twenty years from now, no piece of software that is currently in use will still be in use in any identifiable way.

Yeah! Like that MP3 algorithm - no one uses that any more. (many patents)

Or RSA public-key cryptography - nobody uses that old thing. (patent)

But this assertion has an even bigger problem than being factually incorrect: it's impossible to apply it. There is no bright-line test for "software" vs. "hardware" vs. "biotech," etc. In fact, many inventions cross these boundaries - that's what's cool about technology. What patent term would you afford to a patent for a hardware circuit that implements a bioinformatics algorithm?

- David Stein

I also seriously doubt AAC will be patent free (or any other audio compression format for that matter), it's just that MP3 is popular right now and it's a nice big target.

It's certainly not patent free, but the licensing is simpler:

I *believe* that the big problem with MP3 is that it requires licensing fees to distribute/stream (percentage of revenue - http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/), whereas AAC does not - you just pay for the license to use the encoder, with the encoder writers paying the fees for licensing to the holders (www.vialicensing.com).

So, iTunes and Real which both use AAC under their encryption layers and the music companies which distribute through them don't have to pay, except for the one-off encoder licenses for however many simultaneous encodes they need to run.

The trouble is that the numerous patents for audio compression aren't limited to any specific format...

You mean patents like these..? :(

It is no longer a dime anymore. The IC prices are not listed online, but the per device prices are for hardware items.

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/hardware.html

At the bottom of the page is tha item that unless you buy chips with the license, the minimum for doing it yourself is $15,000 USD. If you are making a limited quanity of an item, the minimum can be a showstopper unless you buy chips from someone else, which may also be a little expensive. Dropping MP3 can save a chunk of change since a free alternative exists.

It's the PNG/GIF thing all over again.

(unless the school put out some dough--every OSS system I've used required some shady means of enabling mp3 playback)

Since money is not charged per copy of Linux, they do not include software that requires a payment to be made per copy. MP3 decoders and codecs require a payment. Detailes are here;
http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/

Once you download a codec or decoder, getting it licensed is a problem.. They won't take your money. From the Q & A;

1) Do you license mp3, mp3PRO and mp3surround software to end users?

No. We license mp3/mp3PRO software and patents to developers and manufacturers of software applications and hardware devices.

They don't want to deal with retail, they want to deal with wholesale. The minimum annual payment is $15,000.

See the minimum royalties on the bottom of this page; http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

every OSS system I've used required some shady means of enabling mp3 playback

It's because they provide no way to properly license it. We've tried.

(unless the school put out some dough--every OSS system I've used required some shady means of enabling mp3 playback)

Since money is not charged per copy of Linux, they do not include software that requires a payment to be made per copy. MP3 decoders and codecs require a payment. Detailes are here;
http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/

Once you download a codec or decoder, getting it licensed is a problem.. They won't take your money. From the Q & A;

1) Do you license mp3, mp3PRO and mp3surround software to end users?

No. We license mp3/mp3PRO software and patents to developers and manufacturers of software applications and hardware devices.

They don't want to deal with retail, they want to deal with wholesale. The minimum annual payment is $15,000.

See the minimum royalties on the bottom of this page; http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

every OSS system I've used required some shady means of enabling mp3 playback

It's because they provide no way to properly license it. We've tried.

"AAC wasn't the dominant format when people were first making business decisions. MP3's are the dominant one and are open, so why burn money supporting something when a free alternative exists?"

MP3 is _not_ an open standard in the FOSS sense, or free in the beer sense, because it is encumbered with patents owned by Thompson, who enforce them vigorously in the US, EU, and Asia (see http://www.mp3licensing.com/ for details): furthermore, unlike with AAC, MP3 royalties must be paid for streamed content, so it can actually end up being (significantly!) more expensive than AAC for certain types of media distribution. In both cases, device developers must pay roughly comparable royalties for including codecs, and the fact that AAC files are smaller due to a better compression system means that they consume less bandwidth when downloading, and require less storage space, so they're better suited to bandwidth and storage-sensitive applications than MP3, hence the fact that virtually every mobile phone capable of downloading and storing music supports AAC.

As to lock-in, this is a device manufacturing decision that has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple. AAC is an ISO/IEC standard that was first published in 1997, so Apple simply adopted it, and had no part in specifying anything about it (originally specified by Dolby, Fraunhofer (part of the Thompson group who also own the patents on MP3), AT&T, Sony and Nokia). Note also that FairPlay is only related to AAC insofar as once Apple had made the decision to distribute all iTunes store content in that format, it was therefore the one they wrote their DRM scheme for, but the nature of DRM is such that they could just as easily have written it for MP3 had they chosen to distribute content in that format instead.

So those who buy from the iTunes Store are indeed locked into Apple, but that lock-in is due to FairPlay, and not AAC, which, like MP3, is a technology that Apple have to license just like everyone else.

Wikipedia has an excellent entry on AAC here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin g) that should help dispel many of the myths surrounding it.

For instance, check out http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html. Each patent is filed separately in many EU countries.

By subpoening the "wrong" hard drive, which turned out to have no evidence of wrongdoing, hasn't the prosecution demonstrated right there that their methods of identifying culprits are unreliable?

yes, did any of those people pay royalties to Fraunhofer, the owner, or rather, the thief, of the mp3 format? No? Then they're thieves. If instead they'd ripped the music to Ogg Vorbis, they'd be legally fine.

Since some of these laws are way too easy to violate, and violations do no easily measured harm (the theoretic harm the RIAA gets so worked up about is just that-- theoretic), while the laws themselves do plenty of harm, those laws ought to be nullified.

Finally, how does this Dr. Jacobson sleep at night? A university professor, living off taxpayer money, biting the hand that feeds him. I wonder if some action could be started towards getting him dismissed from his university position? Probably has tenure tho. But maybe if he commits perjury, as seems he might, that would do it?

What's worse is that if the RIAA does the equivalent of planting evidence, finding them out will be much harder than catching this hypothetical cop, because as everyone has been pointing out, logs and such like computer evidence have no security whatsoever, nor even much reliability. So even if they haven't been tampered with in any number of undetectable ways, they might not be accurate. With the cop planting evidence, there's a much better chance it'll be found out.

``... In a village, 100 people are about to eat lunch. Each has
    a bowl containing 100 beans. Suddenly, 100 hungry bandits swoop
    down on the village. Each bandit takes the contents of the bowl
    of one villager, eats it, and gallops off. Next week, the
    bandits plan to do it again, but one of their number is
    afflicted by doubts about whether it is right to steal from the
    poor. These doubts are set to rest by another of their number
    who proposes that each bandit, instead of eating the entire
    contents of the bowl of one villager, should take one bean from
    every villager's bowl. Since the loss of one bean cannot make a
    perceptible difference to any villager, no bandit will have
    harmed anyone. The bandits follow this plan, each taking a
    solitary bean from 100 bowls. The villagers are just as hungry
    as they were the previous week, but the bandits can all sleep
    well on their full stomachs, knowing that none of them has
    harmed anyone.''

According to mp3licensing.com, the royalty rate is 75 cents per device ($1.25 for the mp3Pro version). I have no idea of how much SanDisk's MP3 players cost or how many they've sold but I don't think an extra dollar in the price tag would have hurt their sales.

Well I checked on their site FAQ: 1) Do you license mp3, mp3PRO and mp3surround software to end users? No. We license mp3/mp3PRO software and patents to developers and manufacturers of software applications and hardware devices. Huhhhh??

How much are proprietary format licensing fees pushing up the cost of consumer goods?

In this case, 75 cents per hardware MP3 decoder, with a minumum of $15,000 per year. Personally, I'm more worried about royalty payments' inherent incompatability with free software, seeing as you can't keep track of who's copied it to who by its very nature.

It's not the file format that's patented.

The problem is that the patents are for the actual compression and decompression algorithms. These can and often are patented - MP3 is not an isolated case. Here's a list of the patents involved.

The whole thing's actually quite a mess, with several different companies claiming patents on bits and pieces of the codec. This is one of the reasons why you don't usually see MP3 codecs in the free Linux distributions as standard.

The problem for SanDisk is that they're a US-based company, and the US allows software patents. Sisvel would struggle to be able to pull this on an EU-based company.

Go to http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/ and behold the royalty rates for a "decoder".

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but this is how I've aways thought it worked.

1. All software violates patents

There are so many software patents nowadays, I'm sure it's impossible to write all but the simplest software without treading on somebody's patent. But to suggest that distro owners should knowingly violate patents is kind of negligent.

The patents are only valid in the US and Japan

I know they're slightly biased, but on the MP3 Licensing web site, there's an extensive list of patents which have been granted in an equally extensive list of countries.

The point is moot in 3 years anyway when the patent expires. So, there's no time to popularize ogg if that's what they're attempting.

Again, I'd refer you to the MP3 Licensing web page. If you assume a patent duration of 20 years from filing, the first patents may have begun to expire but there's still quite a number of years to go until all the ones necessary to implement a full-featured decoder will have expired.

I'm all for keeping things 100% FLOSS, but as long as a piece of software has source code and is freely licenced then personally I don't care if it violates patents. Its one thing being forced by law not to use MP3 playback, but voluntarily removing it preemptively...isn't that a little like jumping off a cliff to avoid getting pushed off?

Apparently quite a number of the big free distros have legal teams who would disagree with you. From what I've used, neither Fedora nor Ubuntu include MP3 playback support and it's precisely for this reason. It's OK you advocating violating patents but these distros are made by non-profit organisations who have a lot to lose if they come on the wrong end of a patent lawsuit. At least they make the effort to make MP3 support available. If you want MP3 support, either pay for a commercial distro or quit whining and take the 2 minutes to install support for your distro. As you say, one day all these patents will have expired and even the free distros will be able to ship with MP3 support out of the box.

Of course, most Linux distros ship with support for 2 excellent audio formats out of the box: Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which are better than MP3. Ogg Vorbis is a lossy CODEC which provides better quality than MP3 at a lower bitrate. FLAC is the lossless CODEC and provides CD quality with 30-60% compression. Neither contain any patents that we know of (that in itself is important) and both work great on Windows too.