Slashdot Mirror
SanDisk MP3 Players Seized in MP3 Licence Dispute
MrSteveSD writes "According to the BBC, German officials have seized Sandisk's MP3 players at the IFA show in Berlin. The Italian company Sisvel claims that Sandisk has refused to pay license fees for the MP3 codec. Sisvel President Roberto Dini has said that Sandisk could get an edge over competitors by not paying the fees. How much are proprietary format licensing fees pushing up the cost of consumer goods?"
It's not the file format that's patented.
The problem is that the patents are for the actual compression and decompression algorithms. These can and often are patented - MP3 is not an isolated case. Here's a list of the patents involved.
The whole thing's actually quite a mess, with several different companies claiming patents on bits and pieces of the codec. This is one of the reasons why you don't usually see MP3 codecs in the free Linux distributions as standard.
The problem for SanDisk is that they're a US-based company, and the US allows software patents. Sisvel would struggle to be able to pull this on an EU-based company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
Then go and make another codec that can compete with the commercial versions that prevail on the open market and give it away for free.
kind of like this?
http://www.vorbis.com/
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
How much are proprietary format licensing fees pushing up the cost of consumer goods?
In this case, 75 cents per hardware MP3 decoder, with a minumum of $15,000 per year. Personally, I'm more worried about royalty payments' inherent incompatability with free software, seeing as you can't keep track of who's copied it to who by its very nature.
--
Arizona Web Design
"If Frauhoff (sp?) had enforced their patent from day one, you would not be seeing mp3's in existence now, or at any time until after the patent ran out."
First of all, you ovbiously didn't RTFA. This has nothing to do with Fraunhofer.
Second of all, Fraunhofer has always enforced their patent from day one. Back in ~1997, when mp3's first started to gain popularity with digital audio enthusiats, several third party encoders popped up, which were based on Fraunhofer's reference source code. Shortly after their release, Fraunhofer would contact the makers of these encoders, inform them of their patent, and ask for royalties. As a result, the encoders would suddenly disappear from the makers' websites with a message stating "Sorry, I can't distibute my encoder any more, because Fraunhofer wants royalties."
mp3 took off because it filled a need, it was the best thing available at filling that need at the time - not because of a submarine patent. Early commercial encoders, like music match jukebox and mp3pro paid royalties to Fraunhofer from day one.
If you're curious, I have a 'boneyard' of retro mp3 encoders on my site with a few of these extinct encoders.*
http://www.toadlife.net/stuff/retro_mp3_encoders/
*Please don't sue me Fraunhofer.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
No, it won't be more free. The Ogg format is already as free and open as it is possible to get. From Vorbis.com:
There is some reference software suppied by Vorbis So MP3 may become AS free as Ogg, but Ogg is already available under the most liberal conditions possible. Licensing restrictions are not an excuse for not using it."I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Germany's courts and officials are noted for this kind of thing. Very easy there to get somebody's show booth shut down with scant allegations of trademark or copyright infringement.
So, license fee issues for the MP3 playback algorithm seem to the basis for Sisvel's aggressive legal actions against SanDisk. The strange thing in all this, while the issue is still in German court and hotly disputed by SanDisk, is that all SanDisk's MP3 players at the stand at IFA have already been seized by the German authorities. Earlier this year I attended the ANGA Cable (CATV) trade show in Cologne, Germany, and there the Stand of Hyunday Digital which is selling STB's was completely stripped from all STBs on display two days in a row. Allegedly because MPEG license fees had not been paid for those boxes by that company. It seems like we have a trend here to put some serious thumbscrews on manufacturers that exibit at trade shows in Germany.
novel algorithm for decoding MP3. Such a thing, if it existed (which it probably cannot)
Actually, novel algorithms exist for both encoding and decoding. It's then believable that Sandisk built their MP3 players without any Frauenhoffer code.
This is more like the .GIF debacle - where a company claims responsibility for all code that creates or reads the format they designed. It's obviously bullshit, but apparently Frauenhoffer don't take US victories for free-and-open use as precedent.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1