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Bladeenc Under Patent Attack
Zane Johnson noted that bladeenc is having legal problems. He's taken the binaries down until legal problems surrounding some patents ... the source code however is still available... The bladeenc homepage also has a cool summary of the
DeCSS story thats worth reading if you haven't.
Nothing works better than Bladeenc (IMHO) on my system. This really sucks. Does anyone know how to compile it on Win32? I'd appriciate any advice - I have borlands latest free tools and can grab DJGPP or Cygwin.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
Scott
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Man, I just went looking for a binary last week and was surprised to see his notice that he had taken them down. I assumed that I had just missed this from a while ago!
I decided to start using audiograbber on my NT box here at work to rip/encode CD's at night. It supports external encoders so, since I use blaseenc at home, that's the one that I went to get. Gone. Ended up finding a win32 binary somewhere else but it sucked much and I ended up finding the LAME plug-in and using that instead.
How wierd!
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I would think this would be the first of many to show up, unless bladeenc does something different than everyone elses encoders.
I wish he had given more details about the legal problems like who the company in question is and the patent on it they claim to have...
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
Once again, people who have some tie into something as big as MP3 want to cash out on it. So many business oriented people realize that if you keep a tie into something that is this big, you can just skim a little off the top and make big bucks.
What doesn't make sense to me is the overall lack of forward progress this causes. Patenting a product makes sense in many cases, however in the software industry, it puts a damper on everyone else. The reason things get big in this industry in the first place is because they are easily obtainable and open. At this point, mp3s are so popular, trying to stop someone from writing a free encoder that doesn't make money seems petty.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
It says in the facts about the DeCSS, that you can exactly copy a DVD and that this has always been possible before the DeCSS came about.
Is this true? I had heard before that store bought DVDs have a hard-coded number on each disk in an area that you can't write to on a blank DVD. This number was needed in the decryption, hence no copied DVDs could be played.
--
So when are we going to get the PNG of the MP3 world? I can't believe how ridiculous companies are thinking that they can milk money out of near-standard formats like this. You think they would've learned from Unisys that people just won't go for stuff like this.
-- atomly
This leads me to wonder about the status of the MP3 protocol. It seems that the companies writing letters to BladeEnc are claiming something about their proprietary MP3 technology (sorry, the letter is kind of vague, plus IANAL). Who actually owns the MP3 protocol? Is it a standard?
If somehow MP3 encoding techniques are deemed to not be standards, but proprietary technology, is this acceptable by law? What I mean is, if one cannot build MP3's openly like this, can those cartels who hold the MP3 status be considered a monopoly (or, more aptly, an oligarcholopy)?
In a general case like this, with something that is supposed to be a standard, it seems almost as bad for several companies to keep competitors (especially open-source ones that won't or can't pay the big dues to become a member) out of the fray than it is for a single company to prevent upstart competition.
make world, not war
Blade encoder slain
By owners of ideas
Music plays no more
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Fraunhoffer and Thompson recently changed their licensing policy - you can read the new version here: http://www.mp3licensing.com/index.html
Basically, it's like $2.50 per player, minimum of $15,000 per product. Quite a lot for any project.
Okay, let's flip past the "First Post"ers and that weird insane article by the guy with no shift keys.
What I want to know is what company would do that? Isn't the whole MP3 community and all of the companies involved trying to dig as many claws into as many people as possible, just to cling on for dear life? Isn't a civil war between MP3 technology developers going to make the whole thing look sillier?
The only companies that I know of that would do this would be NullSoft, Sony or Xing... Anyone have some better insight?
-Effendi
-Effendi
I assumed that I had just missed this from a while ago!
You (and SlashDot) did. The news page has this in the 2000-02-23 update:
You might wonder why I haven't put up any binaries for 0.92.0. The reason is that I'm still having trouble with Fraunhofer/Thomson and things are starting to heat up. Since their complaint is that I'm distributing products using their patented technology and they now are threatening to take me to court if I don't stop, I've decided to remove the binaries from my homepage.
I will remove the binaries tomorrow, but you can rest assure that this is not the end of BladeEnc. I will place all the necessary details on these pages in a few days, so please don't mail me asking for details yet, I'll be busy writing together a lengthy piece explaining the situation, what I plan to do and what you can do to help.
What these "big companies" fail to understand is that the code is out there. Shutting down the blade homepage will just pour fuel on the fire, the source will be mirrored and passed around the Internet. It can't be stopped any more than the MPAA can stop DeCSS source from being distributed. I think what this is all leading to is a vast network of anonymous developers sharing open source code through an untraceable Gnutella / Freenet like system. As large corporate entities try to stifle the Internet and it's power, the more it will fight back.
The only audio related patent I can think of would have been Tom Edison's original patent which probably outlined a way for encoding audio patterns for later playback and I think the time would have worn out on that one.
But, please enlighten me here.
----
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
Sorry for the bitterness - this kind of stuff brings me down.
- tokengeekgrrl
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions
I wonder how long it will take before someone sues over the source being made available. Once that happens, it's watch your back time as every company with any product, will open a court case. They do not need to win, they just have to spend a few dollars that most developers do not have.
Many people were begining to wonder how the "old" companies would keep up with the speed of the internet. It looks like they have decide to cripple the runners.
The one silver lining here is that Sweden, where Tord lives, doesn't recognize patents on algorithms, so he may should be able to defend himself legally.
Meanwhile, this is kind of old news - the binaries were pulled on February 24th.
5-7-5 is cool
We love to read his Haikus
Please keep them coming
For all of you with questionable materials on your website:
Ignore any and all e-mails claiming to be a cease and desist notice. Delete the @#$% things. Don't respond. Somebody who really wants to sue you will take the effort to send you a registered letter. You can refuse to sign for that too. If they're really determined they'll serve you in person. Once they do that, you have to either retain a lawyer or take the shit down, but you don't need to do anything in response to e-mail.
IANAL - Even if I was a lawyer I'd put that there since I love typing ANAL in all-caps.
--Shoeboy.
(former microserf)
The solution to all of life's little problems. Just run a freenet server and download and periodically insert data into freenet to make it remain free and anonymous to all. Works great.
Look at http://freenet.sourceforge.net
What is power if not for the furtherance of power. Power is a gift in it's own right and a means unto itself.
It is inherently impossible to prevent the copying of something that is there for people to see. If a DVD were uncopyable, you would be unable to see it at all. By the very method it is seen by your eyes, you can copy it, and by the very method it is sent to the monitor, the video card, the hard drive, the RAM, whatever, you can copy it. If it were impossible to copy, it would also be impossible to view.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
First of all, I'm one of those people that thinks that IP laws are a divisive, anti-individualist, and generally dumb idea in the first place. However, I do live in a capitalist society which disagrees. Even so, weren't patents meant to cover implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves?
A patent is intended to protect, for a limited time, the "right" to be the sole producer of a physical product that significant resources were expended to engineer. Patenting an algorithm just doesn't make sense. It's just as if Einstein would have patented E=MC^2 and set up relativity corp. "For all your power plant, college textbook, and unthinkable weapon needs."
It's things like this, and genetic patents, that make me think the USPTO needs to be disbanded. Doesn't patenting a spliced organism infringe on the prior art of, say, God/Yahweh/Allah/Vishnu/The Universe/L. Ron Hubbard/Nobody/whatever else you happen to believe in? And am I violating their patent by existing, since I evolved from microbes?
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
I don't know how much this applies, but does not open standard imply that it's free, or something?
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Quick, go grab your RPMs, or Debian packages, or whatever binaries you need, before the ripple effect takes out the mirrors of the binaries.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It's a well known maneuver and one that standard bodies need to address more aggressively. The trick works like this; You create something cool like a new document format or network protocol. You then apply for a patent on this. Meanwhile you submit it to the IETF, ASCII, IEEE and the rest.
If the concept becomes approved and widely used, even entrenched you then let the other shoe drop and start demanding license fees from everybody. MP3 and GIF are the most notorious examples of this gambit.
The solution is for all standards bodies to require a signed declaration stating "This isn't patented and any patent we have to cover it is invalid". At least one body dose this already ( May be the IETF but I am not sure ). The rest should fall strictly into line.
Force industry to try and push new stuff without calling them "standard" or choose to give up royalties.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Vorbis !
Without any further ado, I refer you to my earlier comments, this, which references this.
Bug me for Vorbis Tools 0.5 binaries via email. I've been having trouble with the web-based server I've been trying to use.
Kenneth, Vorbize, Ogg123, and mp3tovorbis author
it's on the compression method. The MP3 standard itself is an ISO standard (MPEG1/2) and it is not patented. Whether bladeenc actually uses the patented compression method or not, is another problem. It would also be nice to know in which countries this patent is supposed to hold (I know Fraunhofer's original patent is for Germany); incidentally, it would be nice to know in which countries, if any, software techniques can not be patented (I think France is like that, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, sadly, as we well know, what matters is not who's right but who has the best lawyers.
How do I compile it into a DLL again? I could just duel boot over to my Linux partition (SLACKWARE, thank you very much) and rip everything there, but I really like using CDEX with the bladeenc.dll...
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
Scott
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
The Bladeenc site has had this notice up for ages now, why the sudden interest?
OggVorbis (.ogg) is to MPEG Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) as Deflation (.png) is to LZW (.gif).
There was a protest when Unisys laid the smack-down on free use of LZW compression in GIF. If the League for Programming Freedom wants to get involved, burnallmp3s. org is available.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ogg Vorbis is an unencumbered audio compression format with a reference library under Lesser GPL. The format is frozen; when 1.0 comes out, we can Burn All MP3s (the domain is available) like we burned all GIFs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Open standard means the specs are available to all comers. It does not mean that everybody has the fully paid-up right to implement the algorithms listed in the specs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sure, the source has been left online, but without the binary for comparison how do you know if the compiler didn't skew it? MP3 encoding is a tricky business, and I have seen more than one 'properly' compiled copy of BladeEnc give me garbage for output, due to little compiler ideosyncracies. You need either a binary reference or a audio reference to compile BladeEnc from source, and the audio reference can even be tricky.
.sig: Now legally binding!
AOLsucks.org recently got in legal trouble with America Online Inc. The webmaster's lawyer told him that "under legal precedent, when a large corporation uses lawsuits (or the threat of them) to try to silence critics, that there are grounds for a harassment suit against that corporation."
Will I retire or break 10K?
We do not charge royalties for mp3 streaming or mp3 broadcasting (e.g. Internet Radio) until the end of the year 2000. Beyond this date we anticipate to charge a small annual minimum and a percentage of revenue. However, this model is not yet fully developed because we cannot yet oversee where this new market is going.
Shoutcast and Icecast/Liveice users, be ready -- you're next. Not only do you have to pay the RIAA for the recordings, and BMI/ASCAP/SOCAN for the music, you'll now have to pay these jerks for the software. Kinda rediculous, considering I've never seen an online broadcaster of music using mp3 technology showing more than, say, a couple hundred in the audience...most broadcasters had only 2-10 listeners before RIAA decided to shut them down anyways...
And if $15,000 is what they've got for minimums elsewhere, I'd hate to see what "small" is in this instance...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Ignore IP law for a few minutes, and try something like the first few seconds New Order's "Blue Monday" or some other "simple drum track". Encode it with Blade/128, Blade/160, and Blade/192. Then try Fraun, Gogo, or even friggin' Xing at the same bitrates.
I'm no fan of Xing, but I'll betcha you'll be able to hear the difference between Blade and Fraun at least at 160, and maybe even 192.
I consider Blade/128 unlistenable - but even I was surprised when I could tell the difference between Blade/160 and Fraun/160. And after a few tries, I was able to distinguish between Blade/192 and Fraun/192.
For reference purposes, as far as my ears went, (um, and my headphones went) Fran/128 sounded as good as Blade/192, and Fraun/160 and Fraun/192 were indistinguishable from each other and the CD.
Yes, some encoders perform better than others on different types of music. But for many types of music, Blade isn't the right answer from a quality point of view.
If they all output the same type of mp3 file, how will one program sound better than another? This is like the great speaker cable debate, oxygen free copper with teflon insulation at $2/ft versus $0.10/ft lamp cord. Which is better. Strangely enough with ABX testing no one can tell.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
That's like saying, "If two chefs output the same kind of omelette, how would one taste better than the other? This is like the great egg debate, farm fresh eggs with Government Grade AAA certificates versus Kwik-E-Mart corner-store eggs past their expiration dates. Which is better. Strangely enough with OMX testing no one can tell."
Anyways, if you don't believe me, you should try some different chefs^H^H^H^H^Hencoders for yourself. I'll bet ya $5 you can tell them apart.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
It really burns my butt that a company pulling this sort of thing can have their IP declared a standard. In this day of open source software, perhaps we should call for truly open standards that anyone can implement without fear of reprisal. It is no longer enough that anyone can get a license for it assuming they want to pay a suitably exhorbitant amount. That does not make for a level playing field.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That may sound like a very wrong idea, but then burning GIFs sounded very wrong until you looked at the reasons behind it, is there a free open source alternative to MP3? If not would someone like to volunteer to make one (I don't have the expertise to, but someone else might)
You are not me, therefore you are not important
Anyone who thinks that anyone who uses Bladeenc is
a idiot is a bigger idiot.
Lame might be better.
8hz-mp3 is better.
If those using Bladeenc like their program it must
mean that it has some value.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Burst Cut Area number? This can be unique for every disk, and is in fact for some titles. For those titles, the number isn't used for decryption, but it has some other possibilities... such as tracking (if lots of disks with same BCA# start cropping up, then it would indicate piracy, and thus the BCA# can facilitate tracking down pirates).
Compressed sound and Graphic formats were easier to get entrenched at the times these things came out. The Internet has always had bandwidth limitations and so did the BBSs that built GIF. At the time each one came out there was nothing that came close to offering that kind of value for your baud.
Worse yet each format was "free" for the taking in the beginning. I mean it's ratified by the IEEE so why should I build license fees into my cost? It's a dirty trick like I said and one that can be easily countered ( see comment above ).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I found a couple of other interesting things in the licensing terms on www.mp3licensing.com.
Electronic Music Distribution systems, where mp3 encoded data is sold to end-users, are licensed as follows:
* 1.0 % of the price charged to the listener (minimum US$ 0.01 per download).
* US$ 15,000 annual minimum, payable upon signature and each following year in January, fully creditable against annual sales.
Does this mean that if I use a properly licensed encoder to create MP3's and I sell those MP3's on my website, that I'm supposed to give them more money? What gives? Their patent covers the encoding process, and if I use an encoder that properly licensed, they should stop taking money from my wallet right there.
If I give away MP3's on my website (and maybe have paid banner ads or somesuch), are they still going to demand licensing fees?
Also, in the Broadcasting/streaming section:
We do not charge royalties for mp3 streaming or mp3 broadcasting (e.g. Internet Radio) until the end of the year 2000. Beyond this date we anticipate to charge a small annual minimum and a percentage of revenue.
Again, once I've encoded an MP3 with a licensed encoder, what's their basis for charging me solely based on how I distribute it? What if I do my streaming by embedding Windoze Media Player as an ActiveX control in my page and point it at the HTTP URL for the MP3 I want to stream? How is this legally any different from having people download it to their hard drive and playing it from there?
Jeez. If they're gonna be fartknockers about trying to squeeze money from people, they could at least be a little less vague about it.
-----
And while I appreciate Tord's efforts, Blade is simply way behind the others out there. First, there's no VBR. Second, it seriously lags behind LAME and Fraunhofer in terms of quality (I've been forewarned of Xing and therefore haven't even bothered with it). I got serious high frequency artifacts, and sharp sounds (the sound of two drumsticks striking each other, for example) get badly smoothed out even at 256kbps. Third, it's pretty slow compared to Fraunhofer. On a P2-400, Fraunhofer encodes at 5x, Blade at 1.2x and LAME is around 0.8x.
Regardless, it's too bad this happened, but considering Sweden doesn't allow patents on algorithms, then this really should be an open and shut case. A patent in one country is unenforcable in other countries, so only the Swedish law should apply (I got this info from a recent lecture at my University by an alumnus patent and copyright lawyer).
http://bladeenc.mp3.no/binar ies/BladeDLL-091-intel.zip
>Does this mean that if I use a properly licensed
:-) We'll have mp3 fairly thoroughly replaced within the industry by year's end. Don't worry too much, you *do* have an Open, bulletproof alternative in Ogg.
>encoder to create MP3's and I sell those MP3's on
>my website, that I'm
>supposed to give them more money?
That's exactly it. Now you see why companies are suddenly throwing money and programmers at Ogg Vorbis
> What gives? Their patent covers the encoding
> process, and if I use an encoder
> that properly licensed, they should stop taking
> money from my wallet right there.
They obviously disagree, and they have lawyers with sticks.
Monty
http://www.xiph.org/
Incorrect. ISO allows elements of standards to be covered by patents and that is the case with MP3. Among other things, FhG has patented the MP3 filterbank. It is not possible to make (or play) mp3s without a filterbank; it's an essential element of the format. Thus, Fraunhofer's claim that it is impossible to make an mp3 encoder that does not infringe on their patents.
Monty
Ignoring cease and desist letters will often result in a complaint being filed, at which point you are in litigation, which is significantly more expensive than having a lawyer simply write politely nasty letters to the guy who sent you the C&D letter. If you want to keep doing what you're doing (e.g., running your web site), it's best to have a lawyer deal with the cease and desist letter ASAP to attempt to stay out of litigation.
However, if your plan is simply to cave at the moment you receive the complaint, then by forcing your opponent to incur legal expenses to prepare a complaint, you have caused him to expend resources over and above writing a cease and desist letter, thereby harming him, which is what you as his opponent want. FYI, preparing and filing a complaint, when done by decent big-firm types, can easily cost $5K.
The compression used on MPEG video has a lot in common with JPEG. It uses the compression JPEG uses with some additional techniques that make use of the fact that a frame is probably similar to the one before it.
The audio is completely unrelated. The redundancy in audio data doesn't look anything like the redundancy in video data. The only similarities are that MPEG video and MPEG audio are both lossy, and they are both defined in the same piece of paper.
Fraunhofer holds a patent on a specific way to transform uncompressed audio data into a MPEG level 3 compressed audio stream. According to Ars Technica's review a while back, the quality is significantly better than anything else out there.
Just for the record, the issue is *patents*, not copyright. Secondly, patents are on mechanisms, not ideas. The patent is on "how to create a datastream that can be decoded in such and such a way which sounds closest to the original to human ears". It isn't on the idea of "compress audio data to save space".
Compression algorithms and cryptosystems are frequently patented. There are probably a lot of patents on how to digitally sample audio, too. Fraunhofer's patent on MP3s is the one everyone is most concerned with right now, because it isn't clear just exactly what is covered (some encoders, all encoders, or all encoders and decoders?).
If someone in the slightest looks like they might have, mistakenly or not, violated the GPL, quickly inform Slashdot, mailbomb them to Hell, and generally enter high-pitched hysteria mode. If your name happens to be Bruce Perens, sue.
However, if the technology violation occurs to non-GPL software and they dare complain about it, assume a slightly different tack. Quickly write to Slashdot, ranting about the evil Man, mailbomb them to Hell, and generally enter high-pitched hysteria mode, telling everyone how you intend to continue on with said violation.
What a surprise.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Anyone who thinks that anyone who thinks that anyone who uses Bladenc is an idiot is a bigger idiot is an even bigger idiot.
And so on
XML causes global warming.
Does anyone even consider the blatant violation of copyright laws piracy anymore??
I was shocked to read in fairly mainstream publications like PC magazine big names like John Dvorak actually in support of the MP3 movement.
As far as I'm concerned there is nothing wrong with the technology or the format it is just the way in which people are using it. It is scary to see that the MP3 "thing" is starting to become mainstream. Even my computer illiterate friends know what "Napster" is. The question is where will this all end.
I hope it doesn't mean the death of quality music since it is monetary gain which drives many of these musicians to go to the great lengths they do to create the popular songs we love. I'm afraid in a few years all we will be left with are a bunch of underground grunge bands producing trashy music. Maybe, I'm too pessimistic, but maybe I'm right...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
How can a corporation prove that you ever receved the email in the first place? What if I have a filter that sends all emails to /dev/null unless the originating address is allowed to reach my inbox? In such a circumstance, I would never receive their cease & desist letters.
There isn't a damn thing they (the corporation) could do about it either, because it is my right to filter my email as I choose. Even if no such filter existed, how could they [the Evil Corporation] prove that I received the email?
First posting isn't trolling. It's...first posting.
http://linuxberg.digsys.bg/files/console/media/
Looks like 0.91 is the latest binary available -- there is source for 0.92.0 and 0.93.4 at the same site, but no binaries of those.
f
-- Only unbalanced people can tip the scales.
It is an open standard. So everybody can use MP3 in their products. However (and I think that this is the case with blade) the WAY you encode might be patented. The same thing happened a time ago with an encoder for windos when they used the encoding from Frauenhofer.
So what might have happened is that blade 'accidently' used the same way to encode as the company now sueing them. Unfortunately for blade, that is not allowed, even if you can prove that you discovered it yourself.
Could someone knowledgeable comment on the possibility of a program that could recode exist mpeg audio into a free format such as Vorbis? I'd like to do something like: nice 20 find ~/mpeg_audio -type f -exec 'mpeg2vorbis' '{}' ';'
Also, is there a featureful Vorbis decoder for Win32? Perhaps a Winamp input plugin?
--
The only right you lose for failing to enforce your patent is the right to sue for a PARTICULAR infringement if you wait more than 5 years after learning of the infringement before suing. That does not affect your right to sue for royalties from all OTHER infringements.
This is the law. It is online. Read it. Congress has it online, and Cornell University Law Library has a good search engine. I'm too lazy to look it up yet once more (I post this message every time some moron who has never read the law says "you lose your patent if you don't defend it").
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I am not a lawyer, but I was once a teacher. In today's world there's not much difference :-).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I believe the IEEE has done something of the same with their proposed public key encryption standards. Unfortunately, until the RSA patent expires, those standards are caught in never-never land.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Like many of you, the Ogg Vorbis project was just brought to my attention this evening. The project aims to replace MP3 as a standard audio compression system. In light of the current MP3 patent issues I decided to download the CVS code and give it a whirl.
.ogg file turned out to be about a meg larger, weighing in at 4720244 bytes. The sound quality was good. I couldn't tell the difference between the .ogg file and the MP3, using mediocre audio hardware and the Vorbis Xmms plugin.
.ogg output file should be much closer to the size of the MP3.
Building the Code
The Vorbis library and examples compiled without error. Included in the CVS code examples is an encoder and a decoder. An Xmms plugin is also included, but does not get built from the main Makefile. Simply cd xmms && make and it compiles just fine.
The Objective
My objective here was to test the encoder, so I popped my Weird Al "bad hair day" CD in and ripped track 10 to a 16 bit, stereo 44100 Hz WAV file. I then `cat`ed this file to the Vorbis encoder and sent the output to larry.ogg. For the sake of a decent comparison, I bladeenc'd the same WAV file to a 128k 44.1 MP3 file.
Findings
The
Conclusion
In conclusion I can honestly say that Ogg Vorbis impressed me. The project has yet to release a stable version, and the sound quality is already in place. Since the Vorbis team is still ironing out the code, little if any optimizations have been done. Once the code is optimized the
Implications
The Ogg Vorbis project has given us a royalty/restriction-free alternative to MP3. I believe that the one thing that this project lacks is exposure. Once people realize that a "libre" alternative is available, usage will increase. With usage comes bug reports, developers, third-party utilities and peer review.
Availability
The Vorbis website is housed at: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny
It would be interesting to see what would happen if non-keysector-pre-burned writable DVDs were to hit the open market.
I do not see anything in DMCA that would prohibit anyone from making, selling, or buying such media. And if more than one party were to sell it, it would be dirt cheap too (look at the price of CDRs).
[threat]Hey MPAA/DVDCCA: Would you like us to begin working toward making that possibility a reality? If not, then back off on DeCSS. [/threat]
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
OK, I am a big fan of Bladeenc. You must realize that it is meant for 160kbps and above, period, so all you low-bandwidth, joint stereo types use something else. Everyone else, crank it up at 192 or 256.
Try this test, it has proven useful to me. Take a headphone extension cord, find the ground wire, and cut it. Listen to some mp3's with headphones through this cord and lots of the music will be removed and you'll be able to hear the encoder-induced weirdness better.
To my ears, even though Bladeenc may have slightly more of this noise with some music, it is not as fatigueing or irritating type of noise.
Best of all Bladeenc is not Fraunhofer or Xing. And it compiled fine on my computer, read the makefile and go!
Why not? What's the difference between a cease & desist letter going to /dev/null before you ever see it, and a subpeona not being handed directly to you?
None at all. The court can't punish you for not ceasing and desisting if you didn't know that you were being asked to.
Judge: "What measures did you take to ensure that the defendant would receive your request?"
Plaintiff: "We emailed him a cease & desist letter."
Judge: "And what proof do you have that he actually received it?"
Plaintiff: "Uhh...."
First posting isn't trolling. It's...first posting.
Nobody forced you to adopt the standard. Now that Vorbis is out, there's an excellent alternative to MP3, both technically superior and free of intellectual property problems.
Ok, so there isn't a huge archive of illegal vorbis files available on Napster/Gnutella. Yet. Maybe you'll have to sacrifice a little convenience and have a little patience, just in order to stand up for what's right. It's your choice, though.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
First, LAME was not developed in a "clean room" at all; it's based on the ISO reference code, which is horribly buggy and far from optimal. Blade is based on the same code, but doesn't have anywhere nearly the same level of work put into it.
Second, while cleanroom techniques are a fine defense against copyrights, they make no difference whatsoever for patents. So the idea of starting a new cleanroom MP3 encoder project wouldn't really help matters.
What would, though, is the creation of a new format that is free of intellectual property problems. While you're at it, wouldn't it be nice if it included amplitude shaping to make transients sound crisper, and used a few other techniques to achieve better quality compression with MP3? Oh, and why not lots of work integrating it into free software tools such as XMMS? Why doesn't somebody do this?
Ah yes, they have, they have.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
...is that people knowingly build an infrastructure on what someone else owns (i.e. Fraunhofer/Thomson's IP) and then turn around and act surprised when IP issues arise.
This isn't a case of saying mp3s will use this technology and then discovering after the fact, after it has become popular, that someone owns some relevant IP.
Everyone knew going in that Fraunhofer owned this. If not having to pony up royalties or whatever it is the Fraunhofer wants is important to you then WHY IN GOD'S NAME didn't you use your brains and decide not to use mp3s?
Stop trying to make your stupid mistakes look like someone else's fault.
"The source code is still available from this site and will so remain. BladeEnc will continue to develop no matter what might turn out from this situation."
Guys, you can't have it both ways. The patent system is broken, yes. Is it enforcable? Sure. Responses like the one above mean 'if we are found to be infringing patents, we will go underground'. Ask yourself, how would you feel if someone violating the GPL said the same thing, because they felt the license was 'broken'???
The idea is to come up with our own open and free 'standards'.... This 'Ogg Vorbis' seems like a move in the right direction... If only someone would come up with a new idea to replace the current streaming/non-streaming video formats... and possibly some 'DVD-Like' hardware with open standards... This is the vision to work towards, dont waste time fighting the legal or patent system.
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
Just use
mpg123 -s file.mp3|encoder_example>file.ogg
(encoder_example is from vorbis/examples).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Don't worry though, you can still download the source code, or you can download LAME (as the NotLAME binaries) which is supposedly 100% unencumbered by copyrights and patents since they developed their own substitute for the ISO code.
Guerilla warfare against greedy corporations is happening. (DeCSS, Burn all GIFs, OSS etc) Our weapon is the same as in Vietnam, a invisible, distributed force. Think laywers = US Troops :>
BTW, this is just pre-caffeine rant...
J.
IANAL, so what does this mean for Be Inc, who use the bladenc in BeOS R5 Pro?
Ironically, bladenc was chosen because it had no patent problems. GOGO-no-coda was rejected because it only works in x86 and licencing issues with compiled binaries. LAME was rejected because of the compiled binaries issue.
Now LAME has replaced all the problem code with GPL code.
If bladenc falls in a heap, Be could have to use the superior LAME codebase to write thier encoding addon. They will however have to include the source code (somewhere freely available), and GPL licencing (just like with GNU Utils). This will mean that one of the key benefits in R5 Pro (native mp3 encoding) will be available to savvy PE users.
If I'm wrong on any of the issues above, please inform me publicly, so that my mistake is corrected for all.
... are, at least THEORETICALLY illegal in Europe according to the Munich convention, 1972. The European Patent Office, however, has illegally granted quite a number of those. Anyway, since those patents are not legal, Faunhofer/Thomson has no legal foot to stand on to threaten that guy. It's your usual corporate bullying again. And no your post is not interesting, no matter what moderators have drunk today.
They all want a piece of his action... Some of this legal bull just makes me sick. MP3 tech is about as common as it gets these days, and the guy who did most of the inventing of it gets about 0$ out of it. What do these guys who never did anything but file some paperwork deserve?
Eh...
Once more it occurs to me, that it is far too easy for larger corporations to disrupt smaller businesses and free services by simply threatening lawsuits, even if the claims are totally bogus. In my view the problem is, that there is no risc in sending around some letter threatening lawsuits, especially if the lawyers are paid anyway and maybe have a little free time on their hand. Is there a possibility to countersue for done damages to reputation, service, etc.? That would enhance the risc, and maybe make lawyers think twice before sending out bogus claims. I think if such a claim can be proven to be bogus the claiming party should have to pay all costs, including lawyers of the accused party and compensation for any damages if the accused party chooses to take it to court.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
A web server that can be pointed to a tarball and compile it up in the default configuration and a proxy server in front so you don't need to keep recompiling the same version of a package for every hit.
Unfortunately, my luck was not so good.
:pserver:anoncvs@xiph.org:/usr/local/cvsroot login
Attempts to connect to the CVS server met with failure, despite following the procedures as defined by their web page verbatim (to the point of cutting and pasting to eliminate typos as a possible source of error). And before you ask, yes, I do use CVS quite frequently, so I doubt very much I was doing anything wrong.
cvs -d
(Logging in to anoncvs@xiph.org)
CVS password:
cvs [login aborted]: recv() from server xiph.org: Connection reset by peer
Either they've changed the password from anoncvs to something else, or the CVS server is slashdotted.
In any event, I then tried the nightly snapshot. While the software configured and built, make install was broken to the point of absurdity, creating the install binary but installing nothing.
One can copy the files by hand to the proper location and get it working, but exactly what is needed where isn't terribly well documented, and you'll have to put up with several error messages and figure out what is missing before you get there.
I say this not to flame vorbis at all - the project is in development and not intended for casual use just yet. I mention it as a counter-point to the previous post, which to me at least conveyed an overly optimistic impression of how smooth the installation would go.
vorbis is very promising, and I hope the project reaches a point soon where I can convert all of my mp3 collection to ogg files, but it isn't quite there yet. It would be unfurtunatel if people were to form a first impression based upon software which hasn't been released for beta testing yet, much less general consumption! That having been said, if getting a little bloody with the build and installation doesn't bother you, then definitely check it out!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Just use Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3.
> How can a corporation prove that you ever receved the email in the first place?
They presume that you are in violation of their property rights. They ask you nicely in a cease & desist order. Such a letter has absolutely no legal weight. It's doesn't have to be part of the evidence in the litigation, and is in fact not required at any point. While not cheap, letter writing is not as expensive as going to court.
If you fail to respond to their letter or acknowledge any communication from them, their only other recourse is to litigate.
This is why failing to answer a letter can result in litigation. Whether or not you saw (or they sent) a cease & desist letter is irrelevant to the law. The letter is a method to settle *out* of court. If you hope to make such a settlement or any other agreement with the other party, it's best to respond to the letter. If, however, you know you are in the wrong and plan to capitulate and simply want to cost them time and money, by all means, force them to litigate and then capitulate.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but even if I were, IAN*your*L.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
You were ridiculing the consistancy of arguement on Slashdot, and he pointed out the way in which both these arguements are consistant.
Now, I'm not sure I agree with the way in which some things are argued, but decending to saying Gotta love that special brand of "progressivism" that would do Karl Marx himself proud. He sure hated hearing his critics, too -- you two aren't related, are ya? is not adding to the discussion.
Could I also point out that you aren't taking critisim terribly well, either?
Considering that up until recently, I could get into it just fine (I'm on the dev list for Vorbis, lurking- it's very promising...) . Keep trying at it if you're willing to deal with something that is still, when you get down to brass tacks, alpha code.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Just did a CVS checkout from work and it got in and did the pull just fine.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
He may be good at some things but he's got quite a few personal areas that leave a lot to be desired. How about his advocating theft? He says in the interview that people who wrote non-free software "don't deserve to get paid" and implies that you should freely pirate their goods. Richard Stallman strongly reminds me of some crazed religious lunatics who absolutely will not listen to reason when you explain that Noah could not possibly have fit all the animal species in the world on his ark (or some other bogus religious thing). I am talking about the same type of lunatics who kill people because they think "God" told them to do it in order to spread the righteousness of their respective religion or cult (what's the difference?).
People like that are entirely useless, with their one track minds. He apparently thinks he's a god's gift to mankind.
Got a reply? Email a copy of that baby right here: tookycat@nconnect.net (also post it to this board too, though)
Fuck 'em, and do it anyways. Don't even bother with the threat, they've already FAR surpassed the threshold for consideration. I don't even have a DVD-R drive but I would purchase some of these media if it would help to get under the MPAA/DVDCCA's skin.
I say if the webmaster of a site has morals and good principles, along with a stable reader base, he should implement PNGs along with an informative message (for those who might have issues with their old browser), and take a stand this way JUST for the righteousness of it. The people whose browsers don't support GIFs will be alerted to the issue and allowed to upgrade to superior browser, UniDick will be denied extortion money, and the whole web will have gained increased PNG supporters.