As someone who has working in speech coding I'd say this is complete nonsense. The mass of patents on speech coding was a land grab, and nothing more. Much of the really clever stuff in speech coding is unencumbered, and always was. In general it is a mass of dumb stuff that you unfortunately need to use that has been patented. Those patents are not the result of deep research. They are just road blocks stuck in people's way.I'd totally agree with you. At a previous research institute where I work, people applied for all kinds of junk patents just to fill their yearly research quota. For the vocoders, I really don't see the need to pay additional royalties. The basics of all the vocoding techniques are well known. Knowing how to implement and being able to implement a hardware optimized version are 2 different things. 95% of people can't implement optimized versions of the codecs, so they'll have to license the implementation from companies like DSP Group, Voiceage and Global IP Sound. I'm OK with paying for the optimized libraries, but I'm not OK with paying an additional tax on top of that (nearly US$2/port for G.723.1 when I last checked).
I like the Global IP Sound (iLBC) business model. You can use the free, generic C version if you don't need high performance, and pay for DSP optimized versions.
Cheers.
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