there is a way of teaching Fraunhofer a lesson (and hopefully, they will learn 
from it). simply tell everyone to start using ogg/vorbis or even one of the 
new ac3 audio formats. cease using mp3 altogether and then watch what 
happens: no use, no royalties and Fraunhofer goes the way of Unisys in one 
great big hurry.

They will learn, you let something remain in public domain long enough, it 
will be a battle to reclaim they cannot win.

I've been vonverting all my soundtracks here to something other than mp3 over 
the last few days because I've been seeing less of the mp3 formats available 
via p2p (everyone is starting to convert to ogg, ac3 or something similar). 

Besides, when a song has actually made money for its author, why not share it 
a little (the public library does in cd's and lp's)? of course, there is the 
copyright issues too, but then, that is another discussion.

Technomage Hawke

On Saturday 03 April 2004 07:40 pm, Bill Jonas wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 03, 2004 at 07:12:06PM -0700, Wagner, Steven G wrote:
> > I was surprised that a distro like RH8 wouldn't play my music and videos
> > right away.
>
> Not sure about some of the video issues (I'm not generally a Red Hat
> user), but the MP3 issue is due to patents.
>
> To make a long story short, Fraunhofer[1] pulled a Unisys -- they let
> anybody and everybody use MP3 without saying anything so that it would
> become popular and entrenched, and then they pointed out that they have
> patents on it and announced that they would charge licensing fees[2] for
> use of it.  So most free-downloadable distributions no longer have
> out-of-the-box support for MP3, because it would obviously make no sense
> to pay royalties to some other company for something they're giving away
> for free.
>
> The individual developer probably feels he's safe, since it's unlikely
> that Fraunhofer would come after him, since he has shallow pockets and
> it would be bad PR, which is why you can download drop-in packages for
> these distributions.
>
> (Technically, they didn't change the licensing fee structure so much as
> they just hadn't really said too awfully much about it before.)
>
> [1] http://www.fraunhofer.de/english/
> [2] http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

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