Levi - there were two RC3's, remember? The first release of RC3 came out, um, the 17th or something, and had several bugs, remember the really dumb initscripts fuckup which broke USB for people with separate/usr partition? A few days later, an "updated" RC3 got uploaded - same filenames, but different images and a later file date. This is probably the release you're thinking of, which does indeed seem to be almost identical to the final.
Yeesh, this thread is full of such bullshit, it's ridiculous.
Now, kiddies, can we please understand the *real* significance of this?
Point #1: it's not actually clear how new all this is. I've been looking at the relevant page with the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) and it seems from that that the current terms came in in August 2001, which hardly makes this news.
But, for the moment, let's assume this is NEW and EXCITING! What's changed?
Well, for a long time, Fraunhofer have charged patent royalty for all MP3 encoders and all non-freely distributed MP3 decoders. This means there is exactly zero difference for your hardware MP3 player and any software MP3 player which costs money; the makers of these will have already been paying these (minuscule) patent royalties since they started manufacturing the device.
The change (if it *is* a new development) is that there used to be an exemption for freely-distributed MP3 decoders. Now there isn't. This means that to distribute such players you need to purchase a license for the distribution from the patent holder.
The charges they are asking, in commercial terms, are *peanuts*. AOL, owners of Nullsoft who publish Winamp, can pay a flat fee of $50k to be able to distribute Winamp with MP3 decoding capability forever. They no doubt already have. $50k is absolutely NOTHING to AOL, it probably came out of petty cash. Same goes for Microsoft (WMP) and Apple (iTunes or whatever).
To you as an end-user the impact of this is precisely zero. If you use a freely downloaded MP3 encoder in the US you're almost certainly already breaking patent legislation; no-one seems to care about doing this, and certainly no-one's going to try and arrest you for it. Most people use iTunes, WMP or WinAmp to play their audio anyway; as mentioned already, the owners of these will have paid their patent fees already and it's perfectly legal to do so. (By the by, you can't send Fraunhofer 75 cents to pay for your usage of some decoder; that's what the $15k minimum payment is about. These terms are exclusively aimed at publishers, that's how patent law works; the publisher pays the patent royalty and passes the cost on to the consumer, somehow. You don't pay it yourself directly.)
So all this doesn't matter two fucks as far as you personally are concerned, as far as people who use WMP, iTunes or Winamp are concerned, and as far as encoding MP3s is concerned.
THE ONLY SIGNIFICANT EFFECT OF THIS "NEWS" IS ON POOR COMPANIES WHO DISTRIBUTE FREE MP3 DECODERS. i.e. - Linux distribution vendors.
As mentioned, to Microsoft, Apple or AOL, $50k is peanuts. To SuSE, Mandrake, or Debian, it's not necessarily. Plus, for Linux distributors, there's an ancillary problem. Linux vendors generally license their product as being freely redistributable; when you download Mandrake you can perfectly legally then pass it on to someone else. The terms of the patent license you can buy for MP3s wouldn't allow this; even if Mandrake or Debian or Red Hat purchased a license to distribute an MP3 decoder they couldn't legally distribute it under a license which allowed it to be freely redistributed.
So the big problem is for Linux vendors. They're faced with a dilemma. They have several possible options. 1, carry on as before and hope they don't get prosecuted for patent infringement, out of the goodness of Fraunhofer's heart. 2, immediately take all MP3 decoding functionality out of their distribution. 3, buy a patent license and somehow modify the license of their distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality cannot be legally redistributed. 4, somehow fork the distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality is not legally available in countries where Fraunhofer have a patent on MP3 decoding but is available in countries where they don't - remember, there's countries where this whole issue is void because Fraunhofer have no patent. Patent law is national, not international.
There's dirtier options, too. One i've suggested exploits the fact that you can legally distribute the source code to something that infringes patent under US law. (This is why you can legally download the LAME encoder source code in the US). Thus it would probably be legal for distros to remove the binary RPMs for MP3 decoding functionality but include source RPMs and instructions on compiling them, along with a disclaimer stating that it would be illegal to do so in the US.
But I digress. My basic point is a lot of stuff in this thread is silly, frivolous, misinformed, and irrelevant. The big issue of this patent is purely and simply a problem for Linux vendors.
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Levi - there were two RC3's, remember? The first release of RC3 came out, um, the 17th or something, and had several bugs, remember the really dumb initscripts fuckup which broke USB for people with separate /usr partition? A few days later, an "updated" RC3 got uploaded - same filenames, but different images and a later file date. This is probably the release you're thinking of, which does indeed seem to be almost identical to the final.
Yeesh, this thread is full of such bullshit, it's ridiculous.
Now, kiddies, can we please understand the *real* significance of this?
Point #1: it's not actually clear how new all this is. I've been looking at the relevant page with the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) and it seems from that that the current terms came in in August 2001, which hardly makes this news.
But, for the moment, let's assume this is NEW and EXCITING! What's changed?
Well, for a long time, Fraunhofer have charged patent royalty for all MP3 encoders and all non-freely distributed MP3 decoders. This means there is exactly zero difference for your hardware MP3 player and any software MP3 player which costs money; the makers of these will have already been paying these (minuscule) patent royalties since they started manufacturing the device.
The change (if it *is* a new development) is that there used to be an exemption for freely-distributed MP3 decoders. Now there isn't. This means that to distribute such players you need to purchase a license for the distribution from the patent holder.
The charges they are asking, in commercial terms, are *peanuts*. AOL, owners of Nullsoft who publish Winamp, can pay a flat fee of $50k to be able to distribute Winamp with MP3 decoding capability forever. They no doubt already have. $50k is absolutely NOTHING to AOL, it probably came out of petty cash. Same goes for Microsoft (WMP) and Apple (iTunes or whatever).
To you as an end-user the impact of this is precisely zero. If you use a freely downloaded MP3 encoder in the US you're almost certainly already breaking patent legislation; no-one seems to care about doing this, and certainly no-one's going to try and arrest you for it. Most people use iTunes, WMP or WinAmp to play their audio anyway; as mentioned already, the owners of these will have paid their patent fees already and it's perfectly legal to do so. (By the by, you can't send Fraunhofer 75 cents to pay for your usage of some decoder; that's what the $15k minimum payment is about. These terms are exclusively aimed at publishers, that's how patent law works; the publisher pays the patent royalty and passes the cost on to the consumer, somehow. You don't pay it yourself directly.)
So all this doesn't matter two fucks as far as you personally are concerned, as far as people who use WMP, iTunes or Winamp are concerned, and as far as encoding MP3s is concerned.
THE ONLY SIGNIFICANT EFFECT OF THIS "NEWS" IS ON POOR COMPANIES WHO DISTRIBUTE FREE MP3 DECODERS. i.e. - Linux distribution vendors.
As mentioned, to Microsoft, Apple or AOL, $50k is peanuts. To SuSE, Mandrake, or Debian, it's not necessarily. Plus, for Linux distributors, there's an ancillary problem. Linux vendors generally license their product as being freely redistributable; when you download Mandrake you can perfectly legally then pass it on to someone else. The terms of the patent license you can buy for MP3s wouldn't allow this; even if Mandrake or Debian or Red Hat purchased a license to distribute an MP3 decoder they couldn't legally distribute it under a license which allowed it to be freely redistributed.
So the big problem is for Linux vendors. They're faced with a dilemma. They have several possible options. 1, carry on as before and hope they don't get prosecuted for patent infringement, out of the goodness of Fraunhofer's heart. 2, immediately take all MP3 decoding functionality out of their distribution. 3, buy a patent license and somehow modify the license of their distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality cannot be legally redistributed. 4, somehow fork the distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality is not legally available in countries where Fraunhofer have a patent on MP3 decoding but is available in countries where they don't - remember, there's countries where this whole issue is void because Fraunhofer have no patent. Patent law is national, not international.
There's dirtier options, too. One i've suggested exploits the fact that you can legally distribute the source code to something that infringes patent under US law. (This is why you can legally download the LAME encoder source code in the US). Thus it would probably be legal for distros to remove the binary RPMs for MP3 decoding functionality but include source RPMs and instructions on compiling them, along with a disclaimer stating that it would be illegal to do so in the US.
But I digress. My basic point is a lot of stuff in this thread is silly, frivolous, misinformed, and irrelevant. The big issue of this patent is purely and simply a problem for Linux vendors.