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The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

iis.fraunhofer.de

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Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#201

Post by midnightclubbed »

rangibaby wrote: post #196
midnightclubbed wrote: post #191

Some number of years ago I wrote an mp3 decoder for a game I was working on. It allowed us to put hours of speech onto our 16Mb N64 cartridge (yep, it was quite a few years ago). Knowing we had to get a mp3 license I contacted Fraunhofer who decided that a console game required a hardware decoding license which ran at $10,000s (if we had been a PC title it would have been a few $100 as I remember). Legal got involved…

Perfect Dark?

Conker's Bad Fur Day.

I dont think Perfect Dark used that code, they used adpcm for their speech as I remember.

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#202

Post by midnightclubbed »

kevindong wrote: post #194
juskrey wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider Ogg Vorbis?

Given that the N64 was released in the North America in September 1996 and that the first stable release of Vorbis wasn't released until May 2000, it's very probable that OP couldn't have considered/used Vorbis.

It was probably 1999 that I wrote the first version. Ogg was still in development at that point. I know I considered a few codecs but mp3 was relatively well supported with 'reference' codecs.

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#203

Post by maxlybbert »

josaka wrote: post #175
maxlybbert wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, patents on ideas, business processes, and algorithms are not allowed. However, there's a goofy (court approved) legal idea that software transforms a general-purpose computer into a single-purpose computer, and that transformation makes software patentable. The general-purpose computer to single-purpose computer transformation cracks me up (and makes it obvious that the law doesn't necessarily have any rel…

>that transformation makes software patentable This isn't true in many cases after the Supreme Court decision Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014. Now we have a rule more like that in Europe, where some software is patent-eligible if it's sufficiently technical (e.g., something like RSA, or better cache management) and not patent eligible if it's not technical (e.g, CRUD apps, or new views on a database).

Thank you for the update. I wasn't aware of the Alice decision.

When I said "court approved" I meant Federal Circuit, as in Alappat ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Alappat#Majority_opinion ): "We have held that such programming creates a new machine, because a general purpose computer in effect becomes a special purpose computer once it is programmed to perform particular functions pursuant to instructions from program software."

On the one hand, several Supreme Court decisions appear to leave less room for software patents. On the other hand, I don't think the Supreme Court has an overall goal in mind. I believe the problem comes from the fact that the law prohibits patenting natural laws, but allows patenting the application of natural laws. It's hard to distinguish between those two ideas; and I believe impossible to distinguish between them when it comes to software.

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#204

Post by rangibaby »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #201
rangibaby wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect Dark?

Conker's Bad Fur Day. I dont think Perfect Dark used that code, they used adpcm for their speech as I remember.

The reason I mentioned it is I distinctly remembered the MP3 copyright notice from the first screen of the game: https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0015/50/1397802118061.png

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#205

Post by developer2 »

floatboth wrote: post #101
yuhong wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PNG ended up being supported better than Vorbis/Opus though.

Sure, PNG instantly took over as the lossless non-animated format, but Animated PNG is still not widely supported (Firefox only IIRC?) Mostly the "auto-playing animations without audio" stuff is moving to videos, e.g. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/autoplay

Wow. I remember the initial hype for animated PNGs, meant to replace animated GIFs. We all expected it to happen in a matter of a few months, and that must have been nearly a decade ago now? It took 2-3 years before I simply gave up on checking to see if support had rolled out. To this day I have never seen an animated PNG in action.

Animated GIFs continue to reign as king. Image hosts' demand to reduce outbound bandwidth costs finally culminated in the .gifv "format". IIRC it's nothing more than a WebM or MP4 video without an audio track, targeted at the html5 element.

What is the real reason why animated PNG was not rolled out years ago when we were all eagerly awaiting its arrival? Was the process encumbered for legal reasons, or was it simply not prioritized as an easily checked off box by the major players (ie: browsers)?

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#206

Post by Symbiote »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #183
notaplumber wrote: post #11

Recognizing this adds legitimacy to software patents. Don't. There have been free and open source MP3 decoders for many years now.

But MP3 is what made it possible to share music on the Internet and to play music off of iPod-like music players. Shouldn't the inventors benefit from their work? Don't algorithmicists deserve the same protections that say electrical engineers do?

No. They deserve the same protection as mathematicians.

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#207

Post by executesorder66 »

CharlesW wrote: post #172
erik wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: popularity; If you play PC or console games, you probably listen to a lot of Vorbis encoded audio.

Oh! Thank you. Q: Why not Opus instead of Vorbis for that use?

Because Opus was only released in 2012, so fewer people know about it.

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#208

Post by semi-extrinsic »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #89
2bluesc wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

> Societies, like Congress, have a limited bandwidth for problem solving

And as we know, due to Nyquist, N Congressmembers can at most be solving N/2 things at any given point in time.

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#209

Post by throwawaykf09 »

kbutler wrote: post #163
int_19h wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you can flip the bits required to operate a computer with pure abstract mathematics, we'll talk.

Re: The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

#210

Post by xroche »

Manchit wrote: post #72
TD-Linux wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

This has been confusing me for a long time. As far as I know, it's clearly stated that software is not applicable to patent.

> As far as I know, it's clearly stated that software is not applicable to patent

This is the beauty of intellectual property experts: they can reverse a very root concept, by changing few commas, and over-interpreting.

TL;DR: Software patents are forbidden (especially in Europe) "as such". It means that if you attempt to patent the "linked list" in software programming, this will be refused. But you can patent a "method of linking a set of abstract data together, using a numerical identifier as gathering medium". This is not rephrasing: what you are attempting to patent is NOT software - you can have a set of paper sheets, with a number on top of them, and form a linked set of data (printer documents). You could ALSO have a linked list in a computer program. But what you are attempting to patent is a more general concept, that CAN be represented as a piece of software. Of course, what you REALLY want to patent is the later.

Yes, yes, this is fraud. Legal fraud. Move along, nothing to see.

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