New MP3 License Terms Demand $0.75 Per Decoder

Götz writes "The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version."

opensource

[Anonymous Coward]

so opensource players for mp3 will have to pay a fee?

i wonder

[waspleg]

how they plan to go about enforcing this.. i wonder what AOL will think of this, I wonder if they will pull winamp or pay the one time $60,000 for decoder and $50,000 for encoder (winamp has both) fees..

and more importantly, what about all the people with multiple gb's of mp3's, i know i have ~10gb worth and i'm not alone

I think the back lash of angry users adn whatnot will squelch this quickly, surely they dont' think people will actually pay after it's been free for so many years

to the rescue

[natefaerber]

I guess it wan't just paranoia, but Ogg Vorbis [vorbis.com] to the rescue. Let's see how fast our Hardware vendors will support Ogg, now!

What can MP3 do for me that Ogg Vorbis can't?

[puckhead]

I'm not trolling (this time). I really want to know.

Portable Ogg-based players?

[thesolo]

I'm hoping that this decision will result in (more?) portable Ogg-based players hitting the market! I would have purchased an iPod immediately had it supported Ogg; however, it didn't, and I was not about to convert my music back to MP3 just for it.

If anyone knows of any portable players that support Ogg Vorbis, please post below! Thank You!

Re:i wonder

[larry bagina]

I think the back lash of angry users adn whatnot will squelch this quickly, surely they dont' think people will actually pay after it's been free for so many years

Like it squelched gif?

i'm lazy, spell it out please.

[condour75]

here's where slashdot can really shine. I, like many of you out there, have scanned my album collection into mp3 format. Why? Because this was the most popular, ubiquitous format when I did it. I'd love to go to ogg. To do so, i need a simple way to recurse through about 36 gigs of mp3s and reencode them into ogg, and delete the originals. I know there's no reason why one shell command shouldn't suffice. I know if I were to do a decent search through freshmeat, i'd be able to find a command-line program to do it, and the proper args, etc. But i know someone here already knows it. ***PLEASE*** post instructions, and whatever software i need to get, and yours is the karma and everything in it.

Why ogg isn't quite the answer

[stuyman]

There's going to be quite a few posts (and there already are some) asking if Ogg is ready for use, why people don't use Ogg, etc. As of now, Ogg is certainly a good choice, because noone is claiming to have a patent on its technology. However, there is a problem.

US patent law doesn't require you to disclose your patent within any given period of time. You can wait until half the country is using Ogg decoders, then sue all those people. Because of this, there's no such thing as a known unpatented technology. You can only make a good attempt.

So, how do we create guaranteed patent-free formats? My theory has always been you create a non-profit, and then use the nonprofit to discover new technology for you encoder, which the nonprofit patents. Then it licenses the patent as free for everyone. It's not foolproof, but it's a pretty good bet that this would have less patent issues. Then again, for now, Ogg it is...

--

Pass it on

[Brento]

Absolutely brilliant. Wait until it gets mass market acceptance, then start charging fees. Now that I've got a portable MP3 player, an MP3-compatible DVD player, and all 300+ CD's in my collection digitized in MP3 format, now bring out the fees. You win, guys, here's my $3.00 for the car, the DVD deck, and WinAmp on my laptop and desktop. Sure beats re-recording everything in Ogg, which wasn't mainstream enough when I first started ripping my CD's a couple of years back.

What? You don't agree? Well, my time's worth the $3. If they charged $10 per decoder, I'd still probably pay it - and in fact, that's the only mistake I think they're making, not charging enough. Because while I'd gladly pay $3 today, they should realize that going forward, I won't rip a single song in MP3 format. They'll make short-term revenues by screwing guys like me, but they're digging a hole in the long run.

Heh

[superdan2k]

Of course, this is going to start the slew of "Ogg Vorbis is going to be the new standard" posts, to which I say: yeah, right.

Personally, I'm wondering if the RIAA didn't pressure the owners of the patent into doing this, but that's beside the point. The point is, just because something that was free now costs money doesn't mean it's going to vanish overnight. Most people will download a single MP3 player and use that, and 75 cents is a negligible amount in the scheme of iPod pricing.

The way around this, of course, is for a company to write the update to their software, and release it as a program that will patch the executable file, rather than release a whole new file. The fee applies to decoders, not software that modifies the decoders.

Ogg Vorbis is great, it's free, and I hope they add support for it into the iPod and iTunes, but it's still going to be a long time before a format as deeply-entrenched as MP3 disappears.

(Reversing your logic would mean that MS Windoze would cease to be the standard simply because Linux is free.)

Re:Do they not realize the effect of this?

[Neon Spiral Injector]

How about piping the output of mpg123 into oggenc?

I wouldn't do it, probally for the same reason they say on the page. MP3 and Vorbis compression throw away different parts of the signal, so you could end up with a pretty poor sounding file.

But as for the software, I could whip up a shell script that would do what you want in a few minutes, including pulling the tags from the MP3 and putting them in the Ogg, and optionally removing the MP3 when you are done. (Actually I think I have seen this exact script written by someone else before.)

Re:iPod, Archos Jukebox, Rio, etc.

[forevermore]

My wife owns an iRiver SlimX [iriveramerica.com], and when we showed it off to one of my ogg-loving friends, he immediately emailed them and asked about future ogg support (for those who don't know, iRiver releases frequent firmware updates based on user suggestions). Their reply was that they were already considering ogg, and support would most likely be in one of the next major firmware releases (unfortunately, a major release could be awhile). So, there may yet be hope.

Show your support for this petition then.

[eddy]

"Our goal is it to convince hardware manufacturers to include ogg vorbis support in their products. Ogg Vorbis is a high quality audio codec which is patent free!"

Sign here [petitiononline.com]

Will you be signee 2102?

(Yeah, yeah, petitions don't work. Whatever)

This reminds me of another tax...

[saskboy]

There is some tax on "music" CD-Rs in Canada, but not on "data" CD-Rs. When I heard this I said, "What!?" So you have the option of paying more for CDs that you will burn your music backups to, and the same for CDs that contain just "ordinary" data.
There has been a tax on recordable magnetic music media for more than a year now, with the proceeds supposedly going to battered musicians, or perhaps just to deter audio tape pirating, I'm not sure which...
Last year there was brief fuss when a Liberal cabinet minister in charge of Canadian Heritage, Shiela Copps, thought that a $400 surcharge on MP3 players, would be a good way to curb music piracy. I don't think the details of how to destinguish an portable MP3 player, from just another computer were able to be worked out, so this was just one reason that ill formed idea died on the table.
So much to tax, so little time. Isn't it bad enough that governments tax our purchases, now we are letting companies write taxes into their licences? Sheesh.

Where's the facts?

[Lxy]

Ok. Most people have figured out by now that these prices have been up for a long time. Is there A) any evidence that open source decoders (like mpg123) are being bullied around, and B) any official statement from Redhat that they're intentionally pulling MP3 decoders from Rawhide?

What packages were removed?

[Critical_]

Is there a list somewhere of the packages that were removed from Rawhide? If so, I could compile new meta-rpm such that it would install the latest versions of each onto new RedHat installs.

Re:Thank god for ogg!

[JWW]

Yeah, better make sure you turn that off while you can.

It should work fine for you until that EULA you agreed to initiates an automatic OS upgrade will turn it back on and invalidate all of your files.

Re:There outta be a law...

[HiThere]

That's not quite right. Submarine patents have, I believe, made illegal. But this wasn't a submarine patent. A submarine patent is one that is applied for, and then repeatedly has it's release date postpooned to ammend the claims. This allowed the claim to be made at one date, and not become effective as a patent until much later. Which would be when the countdown toward expiration started.

Re:this IS a change from before

[Anonymous Coward]

However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.

Re:Thank god for ogg!

[Hater's Leaving, The]

Maybe it's because they don't (develop and) sell software for linux?

So without software you'd be wanting the 'patent only' royalty, at a bargain $0.75.

If you look at the 3rd box down on the page you'll see it.

THL

Re:this IS a change from before

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't resist starting that with a nice /.esque 'wrong,' could you? And then you go on to say 'rather, right, but...' Come on.

Re:Winamp has been ready for this for a while...

[grungeKid]

I'd guess that AOL already has paid the $50000 one-time licence fee instead.

Hold the phone.

[johnlcallaway]

From their own site [mp3licensing.com]:

Q. Do I need a license to stream mp3/mp3PRO encoded content over the Internet?

Yes. A license is needed for commercial (i.e., revenue-generating) use of mp3 / mp3PRO in real time broadcasting (terrestrial, satellite, cable and/or any other media), broadcasting / streaming via Internet, intranets and/or other networks or in other electronic content distribution systems, such as pay-audio or audio-on-demand applications.

However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.(emphasis mine)

Does this mean that open source free ware is still...well...free??

marginally OT information theory question

[stud9920]

I've been looking forward to convert my mp3 collection to ogg. Only one thing holds me back :

The sayings are for an equivalent bitrate, I will get more quality from ogg. So theorically, converting from mp3 to ogg MIGHT be psychoacoustically lossless.

For instance, suppose my CD contained 'abcdefghij' and my mp3 encoder transformed 'abcde', which I still heard as 'abcdefghij'. It might be possible that converting from mp3 to mp3 I get 'abc', which I would still hear as being 'abcde', and therefore as 'abcdefghij'.

However, this is not necessarily the case. mp32ogg might also convert to 'abd' or even 'abz', which I would not necessarily perceive as 'abcdefghij'.

So questions to you audio engineers (IAOAEE - I Am Only An Electronics Engineer):

1. Will I indeed get audible distortions ?
2. What bitrate ratio do you recommand for the conversion ?

So let's buy a license!

[Darkforge]

If I understand the terms, if we can gather together $50,000, we could buy a license for an LGPL MP3 library, to which our applications could link.

I'd be willing to pay $100 towards the cause.

Stop the Insanity

[oldstrat]

.
Ok, nobody has (AFAIK) stated the obvious rational response.
Thompson-Gobbldy-GooginHoffer, is the parent of Thompson Electronics and RCA.
It's time to apply pressure to the Legs and Arms of the patient.
Contact Thompson (Insert your Country Name) and RCA (Insert your Country Name) and inform them that you WILL NOT BUY until they release MP3 from the IP prison they have placed it in.


FREE MP3


.

Re:Show your support for this petition then.

[Melantha_Bacchae]

Don't waste your time with "hardware manufacturers". Convince Apple to include Ogg Vorbis support on the iPod.

As soon as an iPod with Ogg Vorbis is released, you can bet the rest of the mp3 player manufacturers will be scrambling to get it on their products.

Such is the power of Apple.

"Godzilla and Jaguar: Punch! Punch! Punch! Hit! Hit! Hit!
We die if they stop fighting for us."
Jet Jaguar Song, "Godzilla vs. Megalon"

Re:Thank god for ogg!

[Jeremi]

a mp3->ogg converter would still need to decode the mp3.

Someone could conceivably come up with a converter that goes directly from mp3 to ogg without ever decoding mp3 to raw audio first... I think such a program would not be covered by the mp3 patents.

Re:MP3 to OGG Converters

[13Echo]

You don't have double loss of quality. It was already taken out when the file was stripped of the things that you don't hear when it is a raw PCM file. You do lose a bit- it is the nature of the algorithm, but it is not even close to "double loss of quality".

Re:Not charging end users

[the_quark]

WinAmp and MusicMatch will do just fine. Note there is a "patent only" option at $50,000 flat-rate. As much as AOL paid for WinAmp, they should have no problem paying 50 grand to keep the doors open (and in fact probably already have a licensing deal in place with Fraunhofer that covers WinAmp). Ditto MusicMatch.

Who this kills is the free (as in speech) players - Zinf [zinf.org], XMMS [xmms.org], etc. They can't afford $50k OR $0.75/copy. They can either hope Fraunhofer doesn't notice them, or try to relocate to a place with either no software patents or no Fraunhofer patent, or they can leave MP3. In fact, Linux users in general may be left out in the cold, because I'm not aware of any commercial MP3 decoders for Linux, at all.

Unfortunately, this probably won't be enough to move the world from MP3s. WinAmp will still be downloadable for free, which is all 98% of users care about.

I remember when I was at EMusic [emusic.com], I met with the Thompson guys, who were trying to figure out how to make money on this (circa 1999). I explained to them that nobody was going to pay for a decoder, and that their choice was either to give the decoder away or have people switch to something else. I also suggested the encoder should be free for non-commercial use, in order to cement their current dominance against (then soon-to-be-released) Windows Media.

One of them replied (imagine a German accent), "I see! Vee give avay evrysing for free, and you make more money selling music!"

So, you could say we had a meeting of the minds. :)

Re:Winamp has been ready for this for a while...

[delus10n0]

You are so full of shit it isn't even funny.

As a beta tester and someone who has done work for Nullsoft in the past, I can assure you that IN_MP3.dll isn't going anywhere. Besides, there isn't going to be any new versions of Winamp 2. Winamp 3 is released and development is being focused on that.

Re:Thank god for ogg!

[norton_I]

However, as long as you are willing to live with a slight loss of quality and/or a slight increase in file size, it should be nowhere near as bad as for analog files. If you do mp3->wav, the wave file should already be quantized in such a way that it is easily compressable by another program. In principle, for instance, you should be able to re MP3 encode with no further loss of quality (whether actual MP3 encoders do this is another question). Ogg uses a different algorithm, so there will be a slight degredation, but it shouldn't be that bad if the encoder is designed to handle low entropy input well.

Whether this happens in reality, I don't know, but I am sure some smart people could figure out a way to do it.

Paris Convention

[nuggz]

This is a common misconception.
The Paris convention allows the patent holder to apply for a patent in other countries, within a year of the initial filing, and use the initial filing date in the first country as the filing date.

It does not give automatic patents in all countries.

IANAL, but that is how the Patent Lawyer explained it to me.

Re: They've got a good racket going...

[Antity]

So if I needed several hours to figure something out I should be able to patent it? Just figured out a new mouseclick combination to navigate faster through Slashdot...

And, regarding E=mc^2: Don't you think it took several hours as well to come to this conclusion? So why don't you think one should be able to patent this formula as well?

This is the problem with algorithm patents. They're not a "product". It's very dangerous to make mathematical formulas patentable, because most of them are just observations like "hey, this and this has happened if I combine numbers A and B like this", not inventions.

Just imagine someone would own a patent on Fast-Fourier-Transformation (FFT). What would happen? This is very close to JPEG and MP3 techniques, btw.

Re:Thank god for ogg!

[Zangief]

But, existing decoders shouldn't have to pay for licences, don't they?

Re:MP3 to OGG Converters

[zorander]

but we're not doing hundreds of times, just reencoding once, which IMHO doesn't sound too bad if you've already accepted the shortcomings of mp3 compared to PCM or LP....

Jpeg is considerably worse if you really think about it. How many encodings does it take to reduce to an all white or all black pane again?

Brian

Re:Portable Ogg-based players?

[7-Vodka]

add to this the fact that if you go with ogg vorbis for example, you don't have to hire lawyers to figure out what you can and can't do, you don't have to keep track of what you owe and you don't have to pay it. Add to this you get a lot of work that's already done, you don't have to license even more tech from another company to encode,decode,play etc. Add to that you get all the freedoms of the GPL and thousands of user testers and free coders improving and bugfixing the format and codec. Seems like it's worth it to me.

So that's why JMF went missing?

[realinvalidname]

Sun pulled downloads of the Java Media Framework [sun.com] last week because of an undisclosed "licensing issue". Wonder if this it.

Guess there's no point promoting my open-source shoutcast/icecast support for JMF [sourceforge.net] anymore. Damn. Almost topped 20 downloads.

--realinvalidname

mp3 quality stinks anyway

[esarjeant]

Take a visit to SQAM:

http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4/audio/sqam

Contrast the sample of the Glockenspiel with a LAME encoding -vs- Oggenc. No comparison! You can barely tell the difference between OGG and the original sample, but with the MP3 sample it's quite clear how the attack of the mallet has been obstructed.

Another interesting contrast is ATRAC, which also fails under some circumstances (http://www.minidisc.org/atrac_breakdown.html).

Yes -- these are lossy algorithms so we should expect them to be less than representative of the original sound. But let's at least aim for something of reasonable quality, and I think OGG clearly has MP3 beat in this regard.

This will also affect DivX

[halfelven]

Since DivX is traditionally using MP3 to encode the sound, we're going to see some effects here as well.

One alternative that's explored by some projects, like transcode [uni-goettingen.de] is to continue to use the DivX codec for video, but embed Ogg instead of MP3 in the .avi for sound. Seems like it's working pretty well.

Re:Dedicated MPEG chip

[BlueGecko]

How do you know that the iPod player doesn't have a dedicated MP3 chip that takes an MPEG audio bitstream on one set of pins and produces WAV audio on another? (It does.)

While you're entirely correct, there are two ARMs in there that ought to have enough power to handle Ogg, provided that Apple were to license the integer-based version of the libraries. What I don't know again is whether the ARMs are really connected to the sound board in any real way, or whether all of the MP3 decoding happens on a daughterboard that essentially just receives a "Play" signal and then a datastream. If the ARMs do have sufficient bandwidth, and if Apple really wanted, they could at least theoretically add Ogg support without an overhaul to the hardware. (Incidentally, the MP3 chip that iPod uses allows real-time MP3 encoding, which in theory would let you use the iPod as the largest lecture recorder ever if Apple ever attaches a mic port.)