-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ben Reser wrote: | On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 12:26:33AM -0400, Richard Houser wrote: | |>I'm joining in a bit late, but as far as I remember there were three |>(maybe more?) totally different algorithms in common use to get an mp3 |>as a result. I think these were ISO, Xing, and Fraunhofer based. If I |>recall, Fraunhofer was the fastest algorithm that gave the most lossy |>compression encoding, and ISO was the highest quality out there. I |>think BladeEnc and a few other open source codecs used the ISO |>algorithms. Do you mean to say that Fraunhofer owns the patents on |>several algorithms, and only markets the lossy version? I'm not joking, |>but am really curious about this one. I remember hearing about lawsuit |>threats about 5 years ago relating to this, but as far as I know it was |>determined that Fraunhofer didn't hold the pattents on the algorithms in |>question. | | | Fraunhofer claims their patent covers all mp3 audio streams | irregardless of the algorithm's that generated them. Other people | dispute that. To my knowledge it hasn't been fought in court yet. | Which means either Fraunhofer has a good case or everyone else is too | chicken to stand up to them. |
Ahh, yes, I recall something about this. I think it far more likely that the general concensus is that Fraunhofer doesn't have any ground to stand on, and that they know it. There are too many commercial mp3 ventures that use ISO or formerly Xing codecs for us to have not heard of a lawsuit over the issue. Kinda the same deal with trying to claim a pattent on JPEGs this month (and practically all other forms of MPEG like frame compression) ..... I certainly respect M's decision to stay out of it though. As long as it's easy enough to add support afterwords without rebuilding all the apps, it's good enough for me anyhow. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6-2 (MingW32) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iEYEARECAAYFAj1bQLwACgkQUMkt1ZRwL1PRQgCeNeFllJhPDldL4zF5Q7SS534u uCIAn1ByspGRye+VXt+ZKiRWBgbn49fC =WicI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
