Thomson: MP3 Licensing Same As It Ever Was

Thomson Multimedia is downplaying the recently reported change in the licensing of patented MP3 technology as nothing more than a trivial, semantic change. In a NewsForge report today, Robin ("roblimo") Miller quotes a spokesman who denies that any change in the licensing terms has taken place, "that Thomson laid down its licensing terms long ago, and that if Thomson's terms are not compatible with the GPL today, then they never were." The patent encumbrance of MP3 codecs has worried Free software enthusiasts for a long time; if the recent wording change represents no change in policy, it seems that they really have been right all along. (NewsForge, like Slashdot, is part of the sinister OSDN keiretsu.)

Comments

news?

[Anonymous Coward]

you tell us this, meanwhile Apple uses the DMCA to force a product off the shelves with no mention of it?

I think

[Anonymous Coward]

it is a Good Thing (tm).
Kudos to Thomson.
OGG is really taking the world by storm.
Open Source is superior.

Now mod me up bitches.

I'd use it in a second.. BUT

[jeremy f]

I won't. I probably will never. The reason? I despite "Ogg", and "Ogg Vorbis", because they're such stupid names!

That's right. The biggest thing holding me back from using "Ogg" is the name.

I despise the name "Ogg Vorbis" and its shortened form, "Ogg". I don't care what books or video games of unparalleled nerddom conceived this name, it's still completely idiotic. I do not instinctively think "music" when I see "Ogg".

You know what I do think of? I think "Eggs". Eggs -- those little round bundles of fetid fetii sitting in my refrigerator. There's nothing about "Ogg" that makes me think right away 'ooh! Music!'.

Even though I've been trained to know what "Ogg" is, it still requires some amount of unconscious effort to process the idea that when I click on this "Ogg" file, I'm going to hear music.

This is, of course, because historically, common file extensions were named in conjunction with what the file actually did.

• TXT. Text file
  
• EXE. Executable file
  
• DOC. Document file
  

Even the more cryptic extensions of generic filetypes, especially in the A/V world, are still fairly easy to decode.

• AVI. Aviation? Birds? No, but there's a "VI" in there. Video.
  
• AU. Aural. Sound. No contest.
  
• WAV. Sound Wave.
  
• MPG. A bit harder to semantically map, but the first letter is the giveaway -- M. Media. Movie. Music. Motion Picture. Now that that association's there, it's not that difficult to unconsciously map MP (Media Player, though I'm sure the MPEG group never had that in mind) to media files.
  
• JPEG. What? Well, there's a P and a G. Picture, Graphic. Same case for MPEG -- G doesn't really stand for graphic -- but having the association helps.
  
• GIF. Graphic.
  
• PNG. Graphic.
  

Even though some of the above filetypes lead to unintentional mappings, at least those mappings are far more obvious than "Ogg".

In short, I do not want to use Ogg because at some unconscious level, my mind will never fully equate such a common file type with such a cryptic extension. If you think this is unreasonable, then imagine all your text files being renamed to *.poi, or all your images being renamed to *.q1t.

Just because something is "cool" to you doesn't mean it's a good idea to use it.

Re:I'd use it in a second.. BUT

[tuffy]

Despite MY renaming of those files, they're still going to be OGGs. To anyone who isn't me, they'll be OGGs. If OGG becomes the de facto standard of compressed music, people will be passing around files with a OGG extension. If a conversation comes up discussing OGG files, those particular files will still be OGGs.

But if ogg is the de-facto audio file format, and everyone associates oggs with audio files, then you will be one of the few that cares about the file format being difficult to decipher. In that case, you might as well leave them with the .ogg extension and add its association to your mental database.

Whether ogg takes off or no, you're almost certainly among the minority that has any difficulty with the name or extension - simply because hardly anyone knows or cares about them. But you can't expect the rest of the world to change the extension simply to fit your preferences any more than the JPEG can expect people to rename their .jpg files to .jfif (which would be the proper extension). It's just not going to happen.