Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you suggest I don't listen to music, or are you prepared with an alternative to apple?
Amazon sells music and lets you download DRM-free mp3s.
So does Apple... the call here is to use something other than MP3.
The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
161–170 of 291 posts
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The loom? Sure. The exact pattern on the cards themselves? Maybe not. I'd say no, but I recognize that US law currently says differently. It seems like the old pattern of "Patent a certain method of weaving brocade", then later "Patent a certain method of weaving brocade...on (mechanical) computers!"
The exact pattern on the cards would seem to be a copyright issue more than a patent issue. To the original objection that you can't patent math, I think some countries do disallow software patents, don't know if it's that reason or something else. But if they can disallow because math, shouldn't they disallow all patents because physics?
No. Math is not physics, as physics is not chemistry.
Patents exist to promote novel applications of physics and chemistry, but do not forbid use of the fundamental laws, and should not forbid use of fundamental mathematical or algorithmic processes.
If you can violate a patent in your mind, it shouldn't be granted.
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very sympathetic to the idea of disallowing software patents; to my layman's sensibilities, so many of them are ridiculous, or after the fact grants of something that has been done in practice for years, or predatory, or all that and more. However, any physical machine or process can be reduced to the laws of physics, and you can't patent the laws of physics as far as I know. I don't think "reduced to mathematica…
One could even claim that any mechanical device is ultimately reducible to a wavefunction, which is really just math.
When you can reproduce any mechanical device from its wave function, we'll talk.
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do you "support a format"? AFAIK nothing will convince Apple to release music in a better (patent-free) codec, much less convince others to dump DRM. Then you start by not giving them your money. It's a uphill battle, but someone has to fight the good fight instead of just throwing their hands-up.
> someone has to fight the good fight That's a noble, if politically naïve, attitude. Societies, like Congress, have a limited bandwidth for problem solving. The way we prioritize what gets solved and what doesn't, as well as how to solve it, is "politics". (This is more a matter of definition than quibbling.) There are various political institutions, and individuals have varying degrees of influence over them, depen…
Here's a reform to the copyright law that just occurred to me. If you buy a copy of a published work, then you're allowed to copy and distribute it as you see fit, provided that you pay the creator the same royalty that they were paid for the copy you bought. Other restrictions such as moral rights would still be in force.
That seems to get a lot of incentives right. Publishers have to pay artists decent royalties, and proprietary file formats can't be used to suppress competition. What would go wrong? Apart from the fact that this would have to be enacted over the cold, dead bodies of a lot of music company executives: that's a feature, not a bug.
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not believing in software patents is unlikely to change a court's mind. Instead, support formats that are royalty free from the start - Vorbis, Opus, and Codec2, for example.
The major trouble with patents, and the thing that puts them in a special category of nuisance all of their own, is that it's fundamentally impossible to know that a thing is unencumbered until each particular claim to the contrary has been hashed out in court, at ruinous expense. And there is no legal proscription against patent owners letting you think you were safe for years, and then popping up to cream off the f…
If an implementation of a patent exists, and that patent expires, it is impossible for that implementation to infringe another patent for the same thing, because any other patent that applies would have been invalid when issued, because of the previous patent.
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#166Am I free to use MP3 now? Or am I still restricted and they won't sell me the rights to use it?
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#167Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
MP3 is the worst performer of the lot, but is suddenly more attractive because it's free and AAC is decidedly not. If you don't need compatibility (like for bgm/sfx) it's still a worse choice than Vorbis or Opus because it compresses worse. For sfx and looping music in particular, mp3 is also a mess because there's no standard way to play back samples with zero delay and zero extra samples at the end.
Mp3 is also really accessible. Anyone who's ever worked with audio in an amateur capacity knows how to create an mp3. I don't think many people would know how to properly encode an Opus file. I did an informal survey on Quora a while back, and I was surprised to see that almost every audio industry professional had no idea what Opus even was. Mp3 is, for all intents and purposes, the animated gif of audio.
> I was surprised to see that almost every audio industry professional had no idea what Opus even was.
Assuming you mean people who deal with audio production, I'm not surprised. Opus is primarily for real-time audio streaming, not for streaming music or for general audio compression or storage.
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
If buying from iTunes, you can choose ALAC, which is royalty free. Patent-encumbered audio codecs are popular at this point because of network effects, not technical superiority. There are many ways to reduce the network effect, even without changing music buying habits. For example If you're a website designer, include a royalty-free audio format as one of your srcs. As a bonus, you'll save some bandwidth.
Isn't MP3 a royalty-free audio format now that its patents have expired?
As I understand it, this is the year that the last of the MP3 patents expire, nd some already have, but there are still two left. One of them expires on August 29, and the last one expires on December 30.
It seems kind of odd to do this so late in the patents' life, though. I understand the general theory behind a last-minute cash grab, but you generally can't take "last-minute" quite this literally. Why wait so long?
Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
The major trouble with patents, and the thing that puts them in a special category of nuisance all of their own, is that it's fundamentally impossible to know that a thing is unencumbered until each particular claim to the contrary has been hashed out in court, at ruinous expense. And there is no legal proscription against patent owners letting you think you were safe for years, and then popping up to cream off the f…
If an implementation of a patent exists, and that patent expires, it is impossible for that implementation to infringe another patent for the same thing, because any other patent that applies would have been invalid when issued, because of the previous patent.
Eh, not necessarily, I've heard that one thing patent owners do is keep the thing ticking over by patenting something else sufficiently close to the original that they overlap and sufficiently different that they can be argued as distinct. Sure it's infringing - but it's infringing their own stuff. So, not invalid.
Note: as to whether any particular tactic like this stands up in court or not, you'll find out if you fight it in court. You and your huge heap of cash, that is. Don't have a huge heap of cash? Then the question is moot, isn't it, peasant?