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MP3 Creator Honored By Germany
^ZuLu^ writes "The inventor of MP3 Karlheinz Brandenburg just received the German Futurereward and 500k DM (approx. $250000). He received that price at the Expo in Hannover by the German President Johannes Rau. Isn't that just the statement we we're all waiting for? A state which completely honours the invention of MP3 regardless of what the music industry is trying to make us believe? The story's available in german at Yahoo here." And the fish can aid in translation.
As translated from Heise Newsticker (forgive my bad English):
"There is a philosophy that everything that is being thought [ / being invented] must be free for everyone; I do not share this view. It is nice when people can afford such behaviour because of their financial status, but I believe that intellectual achievements should be paid for. This is a position where we all are right on the side of the musicians, the licensing organisations and the music industry. Personally, I am not a friend of Napster and it is right that they are being challenged in court."
So, Slashdot is actually worshipping the wrong hero, I guess.
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You may like my a cappella music
And I've certainly dl'd MP3's over 56kbps.
But you can't create them in the United States and several other countries without buying licensed software from a software firm that pays the MP3 encoder software patent license royalties, which are currently USD$15,000 for the first 6,000 units shipped yearly and USD$2.50 for each additional unit. This is why official LAME binaries will not be released before around 2010 (good thing what happened to copyright duration hasn't (yet) happened to patent duration). BTW, to compile LAME on Win32, get GCC for Windows.
If you think licensing fees are the problem, it's time for you to upgrade.
I agree totally. After having upgraded from MP3 to OggVorbis, the only MP3 files I encode are Wrapster archives containing .ogg files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
MP3's not free, though. MP3 was great as a proof of concept of digital audio; it was just a coincidence that the "free music" movement got started with a *format* that's not free. Anyone who hasn't heard of Ogg Vorbis needs to go check it out here. The quality is better than mp3 for equivalent bitrates, and the format is free as in both speech and beer. There is of course a winamp plugin to play the files. Unfortunately, the encoder they have created doesn't work all that well, and there aren't many .ogg files out on the net... but the format has a lot of promise.
Ever hear of a little company called Siemens? I'll just tell you a few things they did since the war.
In 1953, they developed the zone refining method for high-purity silicon production.
1958 saw the first cardiac pacemaker.
Blah blah first European 64K RAM chips blah blah first workable cell phone system blah blah 1M DRAMs blah blah high-temp fuel cells blah blah blah.
Last year Siemens developed the Sivit, a computer without a mouse or keyboard. And no I don't know if it runs KDE.
Perhaps you've heard of CEBIT. It's held in Germany every year. It's the most important technological convention in the world.
You've heard of Bayer -- they still have the trademark on "Aspirin" in Europe -- and you probably know that pharmaceuticals is a rather important high-tech industry. And it hires more and more computer people. They need Beowulf clusters to do molecule modeling, so now I get modded up for that mention.
Are you familiar with Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik? Yes you are. They make so many of the things you buy better. BASF. German, since 1901 (or is that going back too far?).
Germany leads the world in "green" products and their implementation, from washing machines that run on less than 15 litres of water (almost 4 US gal.) to high-efficiency oil heaters to solar cell technology (a new breakthrough in coated copper backing for solar cell panels which drastically increases efficiency is just going into major production).
We've got technology coming out of our asses (arses, for UK & Oz) here. Dr. Thomas Pabst of Tom's Hardware. Nobel Prize winners. You name it.
All that and the Oktoberfest (please stop singing when you get to my street!). And a lot more that I'm too lazy to spell out right now.
Oh... and I'm not German, I just live here. And I'll probably stay here. You see, I work for a high-tech company whose most important office outside of HQ is here. And who in his right mind would give up good pay (even if it is in Euros), full medical (it's standard here) and 30 days of vacation a year?
"We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us." -- Mark Twain
For all the popularity of MP3, remember that Fraunhofer holds patents on it, making the creation of a legal, legitimate, Free encoder impossible.
... use Ogg Vorbis for your audio encoding/storage needs. ;-)
Support Ogg
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Logically, one would think that. But why did they sue Diamond over the Rio? That lawsuit can not be reconciled with merely wishing to prevent piracy; it was clearly a strike at the technology itself.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Everyone dress warm tonight, because the first post on a slashdot artical was actually ON TOPIC. You know what that means... Ice skating down the river Styx. :)
-Ted
I fail to see why the last quip regarding the music industry was needed. IIRC they have a problem with pirating of their product, not the MP3 format itself.