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This is just a wrap-up standard formalizing a bunch of extensions to the previous standard, such as 802.11.n, so the patent situation is roughly the same as what it's been for 802.11 for the past years. Which is that, yes, there are patents on various things, though the situation is not 100% clear.

There is a semi-standard licensing pool, the Via WiFi license pool, that claims to hold most of the relevant patents. But Netgear at least partly won its case after they shipped some products that didn't pay to license the Via pool. But balancing that win, Australia's national research organization seems to be successfully claiming relevant patents.

Does this mean video and audio codecs are also not copyrightable? They're also just complex stream of bits, afterall, and has no particular source code attached to them.

Interesting question. Aren't some of these things covered by Patents rather than copyrights?
AAC mentions patents in their license Faq.

Yes, they are.

It also highlights the issue of software patents.

Traditionally patents were related to machines and mechanical devices, which means they cover a certain implementation to solve a problem. There may be a dozen methods to solve a certain problem (e.g. peeling a potato), with identical results (a nice and clean potato), and all of them are patentable. Yet you're free to invent a 13th method to solve this same problem, and patent it again.

Yet software patents often revolve around algorithms, such as how to compress sound or video streams. Mathematical algorithms have traditionally been excluded from patents. Now when implemented in software it can be patented, such as the mp3 patent(s), which effectively patents the end result and with that the underlying algorithm, and not the implementation of how to get that result. A subtle yet important difference.

Does this mean video and audio codecs are also not copyrightable? They're also just complex stream of bits, afterall, and has no particular source code attached to them.

Interesting question. Aren't some of these things covered by Patents rather than copyrights?
AAC mentions patents in their license Faq.

why can't I play any Apple purchased music files (even recent ones) on my Windows machine outside of iTunes

That's not Apple's fault; that's the fault of VIA Licensing. If you download another licensed AAC player (e.g. Winamp) or a patent-infringing player (e.g. VLC media player), you can play AAC audio files. And what version of Windows are you using? I've been told that the version of Windows Media Player in Windows 7 Home Premium includes an AAC player.

Define open.... When compared to MP3, AAC looks good. It is not as good when compared to an OPEN format like ogg or FLAC.

Here are some typical fees for licensing AAC
http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-fees.aspx

Here is the AAC licensing FAQ
http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-faq.aspx

Here is the wikipedia blurb about AAC licensing and requirements.

From wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

Licensing and patents

No licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format.[35] This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format to distribute content than MP3, particularly for streaming content (such as Internet radio).

However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs.[36] It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FFmpeg and FAAC are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement. (See below under Products that support AAC, Software.)

Don't let a little information and facts get in the way of your bogus "bullshit" claim though.

Define open.... When compared to MP3, AAC looks good. It is not as good when compared to an OPEN format like ogg or FLAC.

Here are some typical fees for licensing AAC
http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-fees.aspx

Here is the AAC licensing FAQ
http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-faq.aspx

Here is the wikipedia blurb about AAC licensing and requirements.

From wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

Licensing and patents

No licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format.[35] This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format to distribute content than MP3, particularly for streaming content (such as Internet radio).

However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs.[36] It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FFmpeg and FAAC are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement. (See below under Products that support AAC, Software.)

Don't let a little information and facts get in the way of your bogus "bullshit" claim though.

Digital Radio Mondiale may be non-proprietary, but it relies on patented technology. These boys will sell you a license.

However, Apple wants control, proprietary formats give it control.

First of all, there are no patent requirements for distributing AAC content. It is more free than MP3 in this regard.

Second, although the codecs are patent-encumbered, none of these patents are owned by Apple. Some of the patent owners are Apple's competitors in the mobile phone market. I don't see how a proprietary format not owned by Apple gives them any control at all.

Many posts above miss the point of OpenLR. OpenLR is not in any way comparable to KML, GPX, GML and other standards for geodata. Its purpose is to allow dynamic linear referencing across multiple different base maps. It is therefore in direct competition to the (currently only viable dynamic location referencing method) AGORA-C ( http://www.ertico.com/en/themes/completed_projects/websites/agora_website.htm ), which by the way is not open and has a pretty big price tag ( http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/AgoraC_index.cfm ). Let me give you an example of where to use these dynamic location referencing methods: Say a service provider calculates the current traffic state or traffic forecast for a certain region from detector data, traffic incident messages and maybe a comprehensive traffic model. The provider now has data on existing traffic jams and might even have information on optimal strategies to circumvent jams. This data was calculated and is available now for one specific base map, say a certain release of NavTeq street data or a Tele Atlas map or maybe even OpenStreetMap data (unlikely). Now in order to get this information out to the people on the road, the accurate location of the jams/routes have to be transferred to different devices, all of which rely on various map data formats, versions, accuracies and so forth. The process of describing (encoding) a location an a road network so that the exact same location can be decoded on the receiver's side regardless of its inherent map is called dynamic location referencing. OpenLR tries (just like AGORA-C) to accomplish this feat. So, don't worry about another standard for geodata. This is not the point of OpenLR.

Apple uses the AAC format which is an open royalty free format designed to replace mp3. Alcatel-Lucent owns the patent on MP3. So, Apple chose the more modern and more open format. Any company can support or use AAC without paying any royalties.

You might want to check on your facts a little more.

Um, no, all the competitors you've heard of support it.

Microsoft, Sony, Creative and Sandisk all produce players that can handle it, to name just a few. Just because your player doesn't support it, doesn't mean the manufacturer doesn't, or that Apple could prevent them from doing so.

Those competitors must also pay Apple a premium in order to be allowed to do so.

Who told you that? As far as I can tell, Via Licensing seems to handle the licenses and lists Apple as a licensee, not a licensor. In fact, it looks like Apple is one of many companies paying Sony et al for permission to use AAC. Of course I may have misunderstood the site, but I don't see how anyone could claim that Apple owns AAC. I doubt a 15c/unit fee constitutes much of a barrier to competition either.

Um, no, all the competitors you've heard of support it.

Microsoft, Sony, Creative and Sandisk all produce players that can handle it, to name just a few. Just because your player doesn't support it, doesn't mean the manufacturer doesn't, or that Apple could prevent them from doing so.

Those competitors must also pay Apple a premium in order to be allowed to do so.

Who told you that? As far as I can tell, Via Licensing seems to handle the licenses and lists Apple as a licensee, not a licensor. In fact, it looks like Apple is one of many companies paying Sony et al for permission to use AAC. Of course I may have misunderstood the site, but I don't see how anyone could claim that Apple owns AAC. I doubt a 15c/unit fee constitutes much of a barrier to competition either.

Um, no, all the competitors you've heard of support it.

Microsoft, Sony, Creative and Sandisk all produce players that can handle it, to name just a few. Just because your player doesn't support it, doesn't mean the manufacturer doesn't, or that Apple could prevent them from doing so.

Those competitors must also pay Apple a premium in order to be allowed to do so.

Who told you that? As far as I can tell, Via Licensing seems to handle the licenses and lists Apple as a licensee, not a licensor. In fact, it looks like Apple is one of many companies paying Sony et al for permission to use AAC. Of course I may have misunderstood the site, but I don't see how anyone could claim that Apple owns AAC. I doubt a 15c/unit fee constitutes much of a barrier to competition either.

aac is not apple's "own proprietary format", and it never was. wikipedia will tell you that it is the true successor to mp3. the way in which aac is proprietary is not relevant to this conversation. an mpeg-4 license is required for a developer of end-user encoder/decoder software; it could never be tied to the end-user, himself. here is a list of companies that currently possess that license: http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/MPEG4_licensees.html .

aac and ogg are the most sophisticated lossy compressed-audio formats; however, for a fringe for-profit company like apple, aac is the clear choice--so far, anyway.

wma survives for the same reason nearly every microsoft product does: not by its own merits but rather due to the windows monopoly.

mp3 is a decent format but it is in our best interests, overall, to move forward from it.

(fyi, microsoft does support aac to varying degrees, depending on the product.)

Are you posting AC because you know that you're lying through your teeth?

AAC is a standard that anyone can license from the MPEG-4 patent pool.

-jcr

Sorry, here's the "link below" that wasn't:

http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_FAQ.cf m?faq=1#1

Wrong. Both AAC and WMA require license fees for decoders as well as encoders. (although MS freely license if your software is aimed at the Windows platform)

In fact AAC's license fees appear to be higher than Microsoft's.

And here is the list of MPEG-2 AAC Licensees which does not include Apple!

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/MPEG2AAC_lic ensees.html

Royalty-free? And where are you getting this? There certainly are royalties.

I think MP3 has some patent issues.

Ummm... there are licensing fees for AAC as well.

http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_fees.c fm?product=MPEG-4AAC

Cheers.

AAC is free?

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/MPEG2AAC_ind ex.cfm
http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_FAQ.cf m
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/aac/

AAC is free?

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/MPEG2AAC_ind ex.cfm
http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_FAQ.cf m
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/aac/

AAC has no license

Oh yes, it does.
http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_object _Licenses.cfm?product=MPEG-4AAC

It's just not controlled by Apple, and any interested party can license it for their devices, so Apple has no control.

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.

O RLY?

Not only that, but H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10, MPEG AVC) is already an open international standard (and, for those who don't know, one of the three mandatory supported codecs for all Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD-DVD disc players - MPEG-2 and VC-1 are the other two).

While VC-1 (formerly known as VC-9, the Windows Media 9 (WMV3) codec) has been submitted to SMPTE, VC-1 is still not open, and must still go through the patent pool process, which itself is being administered by MPEG LA.

VC-1 is a SMPTE standard. VC-1 is equally open, in that anyone can create a VC-1 compliant codec pursuant to the standard and the terms of the licenses. You've also conveniently forgotten to mention that the authors of H.264 compliant codecs must obtain licenses from two patent pools, including MPEG LA and Via Licensing.

"Open" is not a magic word, and H.264 is not "free" in any sense of the term. The two codecs are legally equal from a 30,000 ft view, except for the existence of the open-source and quite probably patent infringing H.264 encoder X264.

> And I can play them on Linux, IIRC without even the kind of patent issues that mp3 has.

WRONG... AAC is just as patented as MP3 and the AAC patents are newer.
See http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lice nseFAQ.html

The AAC format as such is not proprietary.

Try again: http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4audio/MP EG-4_Audio_FAQ.html

And as far as anyone can tell, Apple want DRM, they want closed formats - they are not anything unlike MS in their business practises, just until recently without a virtual monopoly... now we see the truth.

"Apple has built a brand based on user and creator friendliness. They should not be permitted to bathe in the glow of helping creators and user-friendliness while propagating user-hostile technology like DRM."

I am quite surprised that so few other MP3 players support it. Some Sony-Ericcson phones do, as do Nokia, Motorola, Siemens and the Sony PSP.

Maybe the reason why Creative, iriver, Rio and others don't support AAC is because they are too busy supporting proprietary formats like WMA.

AAC is what Apple licensed and rips to by default in iTunes, making song files incompatible with any portable player other than an iPod.

MPEG2 isn't open either, actually. :D

Truly open, license-free audio codecs are exceedingly rare. Ogg Vorbis and FLAC are the only two I know of offhand, though there are presumably more.

Yeah, nothing says proprietary formats like the ISO standard MPEG-4 audio layer.

Who needs to license MPEG-4 AAC patents?
An MPEG-4 AAC patent license is required for manufacturers or developers of complete (or substantially complete) end-user encoder and/or decoder products, or for manufacturers/developers of component encoder and/or decoder products that are

No, I'm pretty sure you have to pay license fees for AAC. Linkie.

Actually, no, "standard" still means what it always has.

And no, it's not better than the "proprietary Apple stuff", because:

Windows Media Audio is NOT a standard by any definition. It's closed and proprietary[1]. Microsoft's DRM is also proprietary (but DRM is by its very nature, so that's somewhat irrelevant).

Apple uses MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) (more info), an open, international standard. Again, the DRM is proprietary, but all DRM essentially is.

So while both are "closed" because of the DRM, if anything is more "standard" and non-proprietary, it's Apple's. Also, if how many people use something has any bearing on whether it's considered something of a de facto standard, Apple also wins here too, since it utterly dominates this market.

Nice try, though!

[1] Yes, Microsoft has submitted Windows Media Video 9 to SMPTE as VC-1. However, it must go through a very long process before it's standardized, and also, this was a very empty gesture meant to calm critics who said Windows Media wasn't open.

MPEG4 is a video compression standard.

MPEG4 is a collection of audio and video encoding standards.

But, saying that AAC is a part of the MPEG4 standard is false.

AAC is indeed part of MPEG4, Part 3. That probably does not prevent you from integrating another audio codec.

The iTunes Music Store distributes AAC files, not MP3s.

However, I didn't think that AAC was encumbered by patents. Apparently, it is.

But AAC is proprietary. AAC is actually part of MPEG-4. MPEG may be a standard, but that doesn't mean it isn't proprietary. You want to have your device play it, well then just purchase a license!.

Real use their own DRM scheme on AAC (Advanced Audio Codec)

Its likely - from my guess, not the article - that they'll stream a file to an in-browser player. But then, remember this is all the words of a third-party "analyst" - which often means rumour-monger.

I call AAC a standard that can be licensed by anyone.

My guess is that you're more concerned with the Fairplay DRM that comes attached to songs purchased from iTunes. The iPod is quite capable of playing MP3s and iTunes is more than happy to let you rip songs to MP3 format.

"While MPEG-4 is cool and all, don't forget that in many cases you have to pay royalties to use it."

And those cases are? If you make money off of it, the licensers want a cut. The guys that created this technology. I see nothing wrong with that, especially with clauses like:

What if my product is based on open source?
If the product contains AVC functionality, it is subject to the royalty irrespective of the licensing model for the source code contained within the product. However, you may be eligible for the Threshold Royalty Free License.

http://www.vialicensing.com/products/AVCH264VC/lic ense.terms.html

If I'm making the kind of money that meets the threshold, I *SHOULD* be paying for the development of this...and if I'm doing it as opensource, they pretty much look the other way (so long as you get licensed first...which should also protect you in the future in case they decide to change their mind).

AAC is not proprietary to the iPod.
http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/stan dard.html

Uh, other MP3 players don't have AAC support because Apple won't let anyone else use it but them. If you recall, Apple threatend to sue Real when Real reverse engineered AAC so that they could break into the iPod market.

Uh, AAC isn't Apple's to "let" others use. It was "developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony and Nokia," and can be used by anyone (and indeed, there are other devices that use it). What Apple doesn't let others use is FairPlay, their DRM implementation. The format is available to anyone that wants to use it. Real doesn't need to reverse engineer AAC any more than they'd need to reverse engineer MP3.

It is entirely free and open...

No, the message is muddied by the cobranding of F/OSS software and propoganda throughout the site.

And the idea that Ogg isn't supported natively on either Mac nor the PC is a perfect example of why this is a bad idea.

Do I know how much licensing for MP3 usage is? Sure -- if you are making less than $100k a year, its absolutely free. Its not worth Fraunhofer / Thompson's time for anything less.

If you are making over this amount, then we are talking a royalty rate of 2%. Thats right, if you are bringing in over $100k, you might have to pay a small token amount in royalties. I don't know about you, but I pay a *LOT* more than that for my licensing / taxes / software for my online business (I have worked for the music industry in the past, and still do consulting within this area...$2k ain't much if you want to be taken seriously).

So $10k? Where did you get that number? Obviously not from folks that license the product:

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

If you are worried about royalities (and want to stay unencumbered by DRM), take a serious look at AAC. The only charge there are for encoders / decoders. It looks as though your site is already encouraging an assbackward software package to encode into OGG on the client side...so why not just use iTunes to do the conversion -- that too is free. I know there are several free encoders on the Linux side as well (because I had to batch transcode several gigs of waves over to this and it was faster to just use a spare linux box and let it do this in the background).

But if you want to see the royalty rates on AAC, take a look at Dolby's site:

http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lice nseFAQ.html

As for being able to play music -- I can't play it without a wierd format that isn't supported by my hardware. At least all my current hardware can play WAV / MP3 / AIF / AAC all without having to transcode it. So, yes, it matters, because I can't hear it. I didn't buy from the iTMS either until it was supported by a large (more than 10%) of the players sold.

But yeah, its part of my job to know this stuff. Again, I agree with your commitment to open source, but don't take it as a religion. Use the best tool for the purpose. Otherwise, it looks at those you are more about promoting F/OSS than you are promoting another means to an end for musicians -- which again is a noble cause. Why don't you do an experiment? Set your store up to sell both Ogg and MP3 (or AAC) and tell the end use they have to pick which format before buying (give them the choice to download all 3 if they want once the experiment is over) and stop the experiment just before $99999 in sales (or whatever you hit for the year) and see what sold the most. You might be surprised...hell, if ya published it, *I* might be surprised.

Sorry if my last post seemed antagonistic in any way -- I didn't mean it that way, but the "Since you seem to know everything about online music though" comment seems as though I was. No, I understand the marketting of musicians and this is one of the reasons the big industry is starting to fail -- they are more about marketting themselves and promoting what is good for the industry but not necessarily what is good for the artist. And this is exactly what I see when I visited the site.

Focus on the musicians and nothing more....