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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.
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 $15,000 per product. Quite a lot for any project.
For all of you with questionable materials on your website:
Ignore any and all e-mails claiming to be a cease and desist notice. Delete the @#$% 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)
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 ?
MP3 is part of the MPEG standard, which was developed under the auspices of ISO. ISO has a patent policy, which basically states that anyone contributing to a standard must be willing to offer licenses to any of their intellectual property (usually patents) that is REQUIRED TO IMPLEMENT that standard. These licenses must be offered to all people requesting one, and must be for "reasonable terms and conditions". That doesn't mean free - the IPR owner can set their own fee schedule, as long as it's not outrageous.
The intent is that the requirement that anyone can get a license will stop companies from saying "we'll contribute our technology to a standard", then turning around and refusing to license it to their main competitor. That's OK as far as it goes. However, the fact that the holder can set any fees they want as long as they're "reasonable" is where the problems usually arise. When only big companies implemented standards, this wasn't a bid deal - what's $5K plus $0.10 per copy to a multinational? With the advent of open source, and decoders for standards being given away in boxes of cereal, any fee at all can make adoption of a standard go very slowly.
The ISO committees that put these standards together have a very tough job (I was the editor of an image compression standard, just approved last month - I know how much work goes into putting a standard together). A big part of that job is the desire to make sure that IPR hassles won't block widespread of adoption of the standard. JPEG is often used as an example of how well things can go - and it's also a good example of how poorly things can go. Not many people who haven't worked closely with JPEG know that the standard includes a lot of features that just aren't used. It's no coincidence that many of these unused features require getting patent licenses (not free ones). So the committees spend endless hours wrangling about intellectual property: attempting to get holders to make their licenses free, revising the draft standard if there's an IPR holder who is being intransigent, and so on. This isn't always entirely successful, but it usually gets most of the IPR holders lined up, reducing the problem and sometimes entirely eliminating it. In some cases (as with JPEG) a baseline profile is defined that avoids all IPR (if this is possible).
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?
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
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