On Monday 25 December 2006 14:04, Kai Ponte wrote: > ... > > > I understand that. However, I was under the impression that's why > > mp3's don't play out-of-box. Even though it's no big deal, I just > > had to update xine and amarok played no problem. > > It isn't a copyright issue at all, but rather a patent one. Some > idiot seems to think you can patent algorithms and therefore some > German Company - Frauenhofer, I think - has a patent on the process > to decode MPEG Layer 3 files. IIRC, the patent expires in about four > years.
Yeah... As I already stated. By the way, Fraunhofer developed the technology but Thomson Consumer Electronics holds the patent, now. > A ways back, some good samaritan came out with LAME - Lame Ain't an > MP3 Encoder - to decode MP3 files using a different process than > Frauenhofer. Unfortunately, there's some question in backwards > countries such as the USSA whereby the decoding algorithm is under > the same patend as Frauenhofer's. > > Hence, Novell doesn't want to get into any legal trouble. > > That's the reason to advocate OGG over MP3 whenever possible. There are some who believe that the patent in question is written in such a way that should they decide they want to (perhaps should they simply feel alternatives begin to threaten their royalty stream) that Thomson could make a tenable argument that other codec schemes, Vorbis, e.g. (Ogg is the name of a generic container file format; Vorbis is the name of the audio codec), are also infringing and hence no audio compression scheme is safe from the MP3 patent. > -- > kai Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
