On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 11:14:34PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hi there,
> I try to understand who owns what of the MP3 standard: ISO/FhG/Thomson ,
> open source, ISO standard and patent-license, how can MP3 be all three?
Source code exists that people can get to, that makes it 'open source'
in a sense... In fact, it is a requirement of the ISO standardization
process that there be publically available refernce source for any of
their software standards.
According to the laws in most countries, you are not actually allowed
to use that source for *anything* unless you've licensed patent rights
for it, LAME included.
> It the reason why FhG suddenly started to wanted money for MP3, that some
> record company organization "forced" them?
No. Several open source projects were 'illegally' developing mp3
encoders without securing patent rights back in the day when
Fraunhofer/Thomson had no idea that the technology would become
popular. This infringing development is more responsible for mp3's
success than anything, but once it did become popular (and Thomson
realized the money to be made), they began asserting their IP rights
more aggressively and threatened all the free encoder projects with
litigation. All of them shut down (LAME later resumed development,
but does not distribute binaries-- only source code). This is the
main reason the Vorbis project started-- to replace the free software
world's reliance on a format it was not legally permitted to use.
This is all about patents, not trade secrets or copyrights.
> I've read somewhere that LAME and the other open sources for MP3 can never
> be a free legal open source because it depends on a patent. Is this true or
> was this before the last part of the ISO-standard code was replaced?
This is true and continues to be true. LAME is legal only if you've
bought patent licenses for it from the MPEG consortium. This is due
to patents and has nothing to do with copyright or the record companies.
> Was there a story about code that by accident was published, or am I mixing
> up?
No. Fruanhofer/Thomson were required to publish source by ISO. The
accident was that many of the people who downloaded it and began
developing with it thought it was free for use-- it was not.
Monty
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