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?"

Comments

Wikipedia says, patent expires in 2010

[Browzer]

The Fraunhofer patents expire April 2010, at which time MP3 algorithms become public domain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

The cost

[zoeblade]

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.

Re:Congratulations!

[toadlife]

"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.

Re:Dear OGG/FLAC fanboi:

[ozmanjusri]

just wait until then and MP3 will be just as or more "free" than OGG (public domain is "more free" than GPL, sort of).

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:

What licensing applies to the Ogg Vorbis format?

The Ogg Vorbis specification is in the public domain. It is completely free for commercial or noncommercial use. That means that commercial developers may independently write Ogg Vorbis software which is compatible with the specification for no charge and without restrictions of any kind. However, the software packages we have developed are available under various free/open-source software licenses with varying allowances and restrictions.

There is some reference software suppied by Vorbis

What licensing applies to the included Ogg Vorbis software?

Most (but not all) of our utility software is released under the terms of the GNU GPL. The libraries and SDKs are released under our BSD-like license.

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.