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Thomson Announces Royalties For MP3 Streaming
Michael Smith points to an article at techreview.com in which "we read about Thomson Multimedia announcing royalties for mp3 streaming, finally. 2% of ALL revenues related to streaming, with a $2000 minimum. A compelling reason to move to Ogg Vorbis for those who have been holding out?" RMS has been pointing out that MP3 is hampered by patents for a long time now; the proof-bearing pudding is on the way. Same Thomson that wants smart cards everywhere; the pay-for-play view of the world is at least consistent there.
Yeah, this already exists. It's called "The United States Patent Office."
Yabbut a guy in that situation is much better served by just making the songs downloadable, not streaming them.
Who are these people that could pay for the bandwidth needed for streaming audio of any quality -- with banner ads? 24 concurrent connections at 64k would choke a T1 to start. These must be awesome banners! Pop-ups, that's fer sure!
And $2000 is $167 a month. I'll tell you what, there are these two guys in Brooklyn that have been streaming audio to the world for ages, cheaper than that. It's They Might Be Giants, and they've had a "dial-a-song" answering machine up for over a decade.
Now the POTS is a little noisy and a little lossy, but if your audio is SO compelling that you absolutely must STREAM it, that's the cheap way to do it. (And hey, the bandwidth is even paid for - with aggregated micropayments!)
Thomson developed a licensing scheme that would only charge for companies that "monetize" the codec. Users can now stream mp3 for free as long as they don't charge, and small-time users only pay $2000. Larger streaming companies, such as broadcasters, pay 2% of their revenue from streaming. Therefore, if you don't charge, you don't pay; if you make money on it, you give some back to the developers.
OK: I can now stream mp3 at will, for FREE -- unless I charge for it! But if I'm a big broadcaster, and I make $1Million from streaming, I have to pay them $20,000. Well that sounds like a damn sensible approach!
Now, the bulk of the Tech Review story is not about their licensing scheme, but Thomson's announcement that MP3Pro is going to debut next week. This codec will lead to file sizes half that of mp3 while remaining backwardly compatible - as in, MP3Pro can be played with any current mp3 player, albeit with a predictable loss in quality. In return they are asking for 50% more (free for non-monetized, $3000 minimum or 3% of revenue) to stream MP3Pro.
This matters. If it's the first case, it will prop up OMDs that allow free indie music downloading and streaming to consumers, and will punish those that want to change to pay-per-download or micropayments. I actually like that. If it's the second sense, they will only let you stream if you're _not_ the artist, and if you're the artist and sell your own CDs, they'll nail you! That's messed up.
Worse yet- they may not have decided which one they mean- or they may refuse to specify except on a case-by-case basis. That's a recipe for massive abuses.
For instance, if you run a lumber company and wish to have a mp3 of your president talking about things, freely downloadable by prospective customers, does that not count as free because you're trying to sell them lumber and using the mp3 as a tool to do that?
I'm not even going to get into the 'musician selling CDs' angle, that's even more ominous...
I think they will refuse to define what they mean- and that's dangerous. Very dangerous.
It means they can chill speech and discussion about formats by holding the threat of legal action above _anyone_ involved with mp3 streaming. Very bad.
Does anybody know of a personal player (Like the Rio 300) that will play .ogg files?
TCP is more overhead than you care about for streaming a lossy compressed audio stream. So what if you drop a few packets, the audio will skip, and you'll pick up where the packets start returning again. Not adequate for mission critical data, but streaming audio hardly qualifies.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
Actually, it sounds pretty generous, if I'm reading it right. Assuming the only licensing charges for the MP3 codec will apply to people profiting from MP3 streaming, I imagine most of the slashdot community will be free to use it as they wish without paying a dime.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Hey Thompson, see if you can get your superior wavelet mathematicians and marketting statisticians to tell you what 2% of ZERO is!
Thomson may get the last laugh on you, though.
From the article you apparently didn't read:
That's right, it doesn't matter how little you rake in, they want $2000 a year for streaming MP3. Better hope you stay under their radar, or start making plans to move to Ogg-Vorbis sometime soon...
Jay (=
Do we have that in writing? ;-)
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
"If MP3 is used for free distribution on the Internet, we will not charge royalties," he says. But "if people monetize, the inventors should have their fair share," he adds.
So, as I read that, shoutcast servers wouldn't have problems, but if there were a pay-for-play mp3 based radio station, they want a cut. At least they're not being 100% evil...
Certainly the encoding and decoding of MPEG audio is covered by patents, and is thus licenseable. (And obviously the content of some MPEG audio files is protected by copyright.) But once you already have encoded MPEG audio data, to stream this data requires only unencumbered, open standard protocols (TCP, or RTP (RFC2250 or RFC3119)).
It's hard to see how any restriction on the streaming of pre-encoded, non-copyrighted audio could have any legal weight. In fact, such a restriction might even be seen as a violation of free speech rights...
does streaming have to do with encoding or decoding?
THey hold patents on the encoder and the decoder, no? So if the data is already encoded..... how can they enforce this?
Just like.... Unisys charging people for using GIF's.. they can only control making them and displaying them, not using them...
Unless you can show otherwise?
'their' vessles, not 'there' vessles.
'ransom' not 'ransome'
There is no similarity. These people are enforcing legal patents they were granted, not simply blocking a trade 'because they can'.
By your logic, the person collecting tickets at the entrance to a concert is a pirate who is preventing you from seeing the concert?
They want fees from people who accept money (directly or indirectly) for streaming, not just people who turn a profit. The fee schedule starts at $2,000.
Or do I have a different definition of "revenue" than the rest of the posters here?
*sigh*
Kid-proof tablet..
>Thompson sure as fsck can't patent that.
Be careful with that axe, Eugene. Them's fightin' words.
I now -expect- to see a patent filed for just such a thing, but generalized away from mp3. I can't think of any prior art, and besides, it wouldn't matter given the present state of the USPTO.
Kid-proof tablet..
I read it somewhat differently.
From the anecdotes in the article, the only way to avoid paying Thomson is to eliminate all money from the picture. They want a peice of all stream-related revenue. Which is to say, that if you sell t-shirts to promote the stream, subsidize bandwidth, or equipment, or studio space, they want $2k/year (minimum), and 2% after that. This is from the revenue stream, not profit-after-expenses.
If you sell advertising, they offer a plan where you pay 3% of advertising revenue, with a $3k annual minimum. This, presumably, would also include income from any banner ads on the stream's web page.
It doesn't matter if you're making money hand over fist, or if you're just trying to gather support to keep the thing alive while working elsewhere full-time and running at a loss, just for a fun thing to do. They want a cut.
This will, should it come to pass, probably damage live365's already shaky business model to the point of complete failure.
It will mean that the low-budget streams will need to move to zero-budget, or find a source of income to cover the $2k annual minimum.
It, like so many other things, punishes the little guy. Selling a $10 hat with a inkjet-printed logo costs the seller ~$2k. I'll let the reader figure out how many $10 hats it takes annually to cover the licensing cost of the bloody ISO standard codec.
All conspiracy theories aside, I don't know that they'd be able to introduce this retroactively. I got my licensed-and-legit Fraunhoffer MP3 codec with Microsoft's Netshow. I didn't agree to pay them shit, and I'm never going to. *thumbs nose at Thomson Multimedia*
It makes sense, then, that it would only apply to the "new" MP3Pro codec.
MP3Pro, by the way, is absolutely fucking worthless - it compensates for high-frequency loss by introducing harmonic distortion and high-frequency noise. So, low-bitrate stuff sounds just as "bright" as it did before encoding. This "brightness" is entirely artificial, and entirely inaccurate with respect to the original recording.
Its only honest claim to fame, is that really-low-bitrate stuff might become tolerable (think 8-16Kbps) for voice work, and that it is backward-compatible with existing mp3 players (for the naysayers who will pop up claiming that mp3pro is god's gift to all mankind: it is this backward compatibility which requires its broken hack of a design.)
Incidentally, this works right now: Make a low-bitrate mp3 (the article says 80Kbps is good, so start there), and a high-bitrate (>224Kbps) mp3 of the same material. Grab a plugin for xmms, winamp, wmp, or whatever, that claims to boost (or "recreate" or "reproduce" or "restore") high-frequency sound. Play your low-bitrate mp3 through the plugin, for a demonstration of what MP3Pro can do. Play your high-bitrate mp3 without it, for enlightenment.
Kid-proof tablet..
The plugins work well for content on disk, but for streaming, they are very sketchy. The XMMS plugins won't work at all, and the winamp plugin works sometimes. Too bad really, because it's very likely that Icecast will have 2.0 out before decent plugins are available. It's going to be hard to get users for it if it doesn't Just Work. Keep in mind that probably 90% or more of the people who listen to streams are windows users and don't have the first clue or the patience to dick around with something until it works. Last I heard, CVS versions of the plugins were getting much better, but I haven't played with them for a month or so.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
That's amusing, but it's not what we were talking about. You start downloading a full-length radio program. A second or two later, you point your mp3 player at it. It starts playing, and it will continue playing unless the download isn't fast enough to keep pace.
Voila, you now have most of the benefits of streaming without, technically, streaming.
the only licensing charges for the MP3 codec will apply to people profiting from MP3 streaming, I imagine most of the slashdot community will be free to use it as they wish without paying a dime
Until you realize that what Thompson considers "profit" and what you consider "profit" are two entirely separate things.
When Thompson tried enforcing the patent licenses on encoding software, they went after quite a few free (as in beer) programmers - their logic was "You are making money from your software because you have banner ads on the download site." (this is how LAME came about.)
So I wouldn't put it past them to say "Hey, you're streaming MP3's, and you have a banner ad there - so therefore you're making a profit."
This will come to pass.. just watch and see.
What hardware manufacturers are dedicated to making Vorbis players?
Interactive Objects, for one. They're the ones who designed the OS for the Hip Zip, among other things.
So what does this mean for shoutcast?
... should make their own napster like program that doesn't have a central server
Nothing. They don't charge any money.
Of course, distributed live broadcasting would be best accomplished through the deployment of multicast on the Internet. Any application level solutions would be hacks comparitively.
Vorbis is already in WinAmp, AFAIK.
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The man who invented copyright didn't expect it to last for 150 years. It was just so publishers couldn't rip off authors.
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That's like the MPAA saying "we think software is never speech." Paying a patent lawyer to look into it would be more reliable than Thompson's biased opinion.
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Gnutella is just barely practical, and I would say impossible for the dialup user.
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Vorbis will succeed, because it's already supported in tons of apps. AFAIK, even WinAmp supports it, or will soon.
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Ogg Tarkin is a barely-started video codec. The only thing available is a mailing list, but I encourage anyone with the time and knowledge to join the list
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Good point.
If I run a streaming radio station, it looks like I owe Thompson $BIGNUM bucks. Clearly, I need to stop running a streaming radio station.
So I'll say "Click here to download the first segment. Please wait 5 minutes", and it spends 5 minutes downloading in full the first 10 minutes of my show, and then calls WinAMP to play back the complete file, stored locally on my hard drive called "1200-1209h.mp3"...
MP3 is just a shorthand way of saying MPEG-1 Layer 3, so it's not a trademark. Why not call Ogg Vorbis MP5? This makes it sound like an obvious upgrade.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Oggenc is significantly slower than gogo, but gogo probably represents a HUGE investment in time to tweak it to its levels of performance.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why must Ogg Vorbis be used by the popular group?
Because that's what the people running these streams are trying to support. They're not going to stream in OGG if less than 5% of the population can actually hear it. It's a waste of their resources. That's why I'm saying this is bad, because when content providers have to choose between OGG and WMA (since MP3 is encumbered), they won't give OGG a thought at all.
A compelling reason to move to Ogg Vorbis for those who have been holding out?
Unfortunately, apart from in some OSS circles, *nobody* knows about OGG. Apart from the fact that the name (whilst cool to us geeks) is confusing and bizarre to most people, it gets no publicity in the eyes of the people we should be encouraging to use it, and there is next to no audio available in OGG format.
All the companies who have been streaming MP3 (which has been relatively friendly to *nix) will just switch to WMA (Windows Media Audio) since AFAIK, Microsoft gives away the encoding tools for free (beer), and most people actually know about it and can play it with no fuss. This is *bad news* for free audio, not good.
They state that they want to collect money from people profiting by mp3 streaming! Does this mean any commercial site which embeds an mp3 into its site that plays before fully downloaded? Sound like fun!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Ever since I first saw this name I have always had the same disturbing vision of the offsping of Nanny Ogg and Inquisitor Vorbis. It really doesn't bear thinking about. Where did these guys come up with it (can it be a coincidence or is Terry Pratchett going to get them to change their name!).
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
They want fees from people who accept money (directly or indirectly) for streaming
If you stream, you must pay royalties to RIAA, ASCAP, and BMI. If you pay royalties, you must recoup those expenses somehow. If you recoup expenses, you are collecting money and must pay Thomson. (Did my logic miss a step?)
Or you could stream Ogg Vorbis instead.
Will I retire or break 10K?
MP3s real success is its placement in the market i.e. its widespread adoption--they were there with the right tools at the right time, and allowed people to use it gratis. They probably aren't the best format out there, but they were good enough and fraunhoffer played the right cards at the right time. Plus they secured their dominant position when Napster chose to use mp3 as its sole file-trading format. (not that there was much of a choice at the time.)
That being said, its dominance may even come to an end when Windows XP gets adopted widely and Napster and Thomson start charging--I already know people who have switched all of their music over to the wmf format. But for now, the market has made it the standard--last time I searched for .ogg files on gnutella there were about 3 hits.
Apparently, this is the hidden hurdle that open alternatives face. The only entities that can invest enough money into something to make it a market-place standard are those who hope to make a ton of money off of wide-spread adoption.
The official site for MP3 licensing details is here. As the article said, they're not actually going to release details until the 14th.
Don't forget the Clipper Chip.
"Marry had a private key. She kept it in escrow. And everything that Marry read, the feds were sure to know."
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I've an almost updated MP3 HOWTO and even though I've an OggVorbis section in it I'm going to rewrite it with as much coverage.
Boy's and Girls..... if you are using any OggVorbis apps, or know of any tools being developed, let me know.
I'll change the HOWTO's name to MP3 & OggVorbis HOWTO.
Thanks
Phil
Something like this is too good for the RIAA to just ignore. I am sure some media company if not the RIAA will snatch it.
Oh, also Microsoft is for a way to have its own proprietary format to compete agaisn't mp3's. Look here for more information on some of Microsofts tactics.
If Microsoft bought the patent or the company they can also sue everyone company in existance who offers mp3 file streaming. But, if you use WMA under a MS platform, you can stream it for free. Just only use NT as the server and the client because its illegal to reverse engineer it and port it to other platforms under the DMCA act. I guess we can get all those product activation cards ready or pay $25 for a cd.
http://saveie6.com/
A patent on this type of thing is ludicrous, and I hope there are plenty of people around to challenge it. Apathy is the enemy of freedom.
They have not patented the idea of MP3 streaming. They do hold a bunch of patents for the algorithms used in MP3 encoders and decoders, however, and, thus, can dictate the license conditions at which they are gonna let you use it.
A little bit of history:
MP3 (Audio MPEG Layer 3) was originally developed back in the early 90s (I believe it was 1992, but I'm not sure) by the Fraunhoeffer Institute in Germany, which they patented. At first, I believe they allowed everyone to write encoders/decoders based on the codec for free, but later decided to charge 50 cents per each unit sold (if you don't sell your end product, you don't pay anything)with a minimum fee of $15000 per year.
At some point, Fraunhoeffer let Thomson Multimedia handle the licensing of mp3 and that's where we are at today.
They _did_ or they _do_ continue to? Since all the web sites switched to png (hehe) I haven't heard much about that story. I remember hearing that Atari used to to the same thing, claiming they had a patent for bitmapped graphics.
Actually, I'm kind of amused by this story. The best tools for making and playing mp3s are all freeware, and I've never been to keen on these "fence" outfits that make money off people who trade in stolen goods. People, I think, will manage to trade stolen music in any format just fine without the help of moneyed interests. Let them have their cut of Napster. Then they can take on The 3l33t MP3z Crue and see where that gets them. "Aww go pass another law, ya bum...". So let Big Money slug it out amongst themselves. Technologies like mp3 make them less and less relevant every day. I guess that's hanging them with the rope they weave.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Why does someone always think that just because something is popular, everybody is willing to pay for it? :-)
A margin of 2% of all revenues sure would make one choose another format.
Maybe the wizards of the IT industry thinks that everyone makes huge profits from their products. They should try running a local radiostation and work at finding the money to keep it on the air and then the money to stream it on the net.
Even if they broadcast ads, when they get to the "2% of all revenues" part, the whole deal will end with a "oh, never mind then".
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A patent on this type of thing is ludicrous, and I hope there are plenty of people around to challenge it. Apathy is the enemy of freedom.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've said this before, but it bears repeating:
Vorbis needs a new name.
Ogg Vorbis is not catchy.
I recommend xph. It's a TLA, it's roughly
a derivitave of the people who make vorbis, it has the trendy "X" in it, and sounds cool.
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Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
So what does this mean for shoutcast? The guys at nullsoft who did winamp and shoutcast should make their own napster like program that doesn't have a central server. That would totally screw over those music industries guys. :)
oh yea, Gnutella
On a similar note, isn't the LZW (Unisys, GIF) patent almost dead by now? I recall that one goes back until the mid eighties. .GIF itself, a user of LZW which was already in widespread use at GIF's birth, goes back to '87, and I believe that the Unix "compress" program is even older.
Anyone know what the liberation dates for these algorithms are?
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I remember a while back that Monty said he was going to try to get Ogg Vorbis 1.0 out towards the end of this year. Features are still being added, by the way. Vorbis won't be 1.0 until bitrate peeling and channel coupling are done. Once 1.0 comes out (which it will, fairly soon) expect to see a plethora of software and devices with Ogg Vorbis capabilities (The next version of Winamp will have a Vorbis player, various hardware manufacturers are already dedicated to making Vorbis-playing hardware, etc.)
Just because Joe Average didn't pay (directly) out of his pocket doesn't mean they didn't rake in some serious money.
I've never had a problem with the MP3 patent..Sure, its nice to have freely available alternatives like Vorbis, but MP3 isn't exactly like One-click-shopping. There's a real basis of years-long research and development behind it, and it was certainly a non-obvious invention.
I work for a COllege station. We make nothing.
Hey Thompson, see if you can get your superior wavelet mathematicians and marketting statisticians to tell you what 2% of ZERO is!
dM
Hey freaks: now you're ju
There is, but MP3 is accepted as a de-facto standard.
It would take time (and money) to switch formats.
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Two witches watch two watches.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Now the RIAA is going to go after each and every web site streaming ogg or any other non-MP3 files, on the grounds that they are obviously trying to avoid the royalties for distributing copywritten works. A pox on the man who invented the copyright, and may Richard Stallman's death be delayed a thousand years!
I'm the stranger...posting to