And I Thought That MP-3 Was a Royalty Free Format

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Beitrag

Amp_Nut
Inventar

#1 erstellt: 12. Mrz 2007, 13:16

From The Economic Times Newspaper

Tangled origins haunt audio format

Posted online: Saturday, March 10, 2007 at 0110 hours IST

Microsoft says it was doing the right thing: paying a German rights holder $16 million to license the MP3 audio format, the foundation of the digital music boom. Then an American jury ruled that Microsoft had failed to pay another MP3 patent holder, and slapped it with a $1.52 billion judgment. But the MP3 toll gates do not end there.

The confusion stems from the number of companies and institutions—including Thomson, Royal Philips Electronics and AT&T (through Bell Labs, now part of Alcatel-Lucent)—that worked to create the MP3 standard almost two decades ago. The patent claims of those and others are increasingly being backed up by aggressive enforcement efforts, including lawsuits and even seizures of music players by customs authorities.

Until now, the most prominent holder of MP3 patents has been the Fraunhofer Society of Germany, which was founded in 1949 and has become Europe’s largest applied research organization. The division that helped develop MP3, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, earns millions of dollars a year in licensing fees from software makers like Microsoft, which incorporates the format into its Windows Media Player, and from music player manufacturers like Apple. The payments—typically $2,500 for a video game, or $2 a unit for music players—are administered for Fraunhofer by the French electronics firm Thomson, which also played a role in the early development of MP3.

The Web site of the Fraunhofer IIS is punctuated with references to the institute as “the birthplace of MP3,” “the home of MP3” or “the MP3 inventors.” Its detailed online history of MP3 portrays the format as an outgrowth of German university research in the 1970s, when German engineers began working on audio compression. One of Fraunhofer’s leading audio engineers, Karlheinz Brandenburg, is frequently referred to in the German media as the father of MP3, a title he dismisses. “If people say ‘the’ father, it sounds like there was one person who had 60 percent of the work, and maybe a few others who had 40 percent,” Brandenburg said. “And that’s not correct.”

But Alcatel-Lucent, which won the court judgment against Microsoft , has its own version of that history. “A common misunderstanding is that Fraunhofer invented MP3,” said John M. Desmarais, the lead lawyer in the Microsoft case for Alcatel-Lucent. Though Fraunhofer was involved in the research that led to the MP3 standard issued in 1993, he said, “Bell Labs had already developed the fundamental technology” in the mid-1980s, “before Fraunhofer even came on the scene.”

Brandenburg said he thinks Fraunhofer’s self-portrayal, while perhaps a bit boosterish, is essentially accurate. “I don’t think anything on the Fraunhofer Web site is wrong; it just leaves out other parts of the history,” he said. “Certainly without Fraunhofer there would be no MP3 today.”

zhopudey
Stammgast

#2 erstellt: 13. Mrz 2007, 10:24

I think the decoders are free, but the encoders are not.

Neutral
Stammgast

#3 erstellt: 13. Mrz 2007, 20:46

zhopudey schrieb:

I think the decoders are free, but the encoders are not.

As far as I know, LAME is open source and the best! But, copyright wrangles are best left to lawyers. If mp3 gets guillotined, let's shift to OGG.