> I have copied the Executive Contact and the Legal Counsel for Xiph.org > on this message. Please drop them on follow-ups that are not relevant > to Ogg/Vorbis. Mr. Rosedale and Mr. Moffitt: the topic of MP3 patents > arose on debian-legal (thread at > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00081.html ) and we > could all use some competent advice.
Just a quick note on this thread. Time seems to have erased the memory of Thompson going after everyone. 8hz-enc, bladeenc, lame, and many other projects have shut down (from cease and desist letters) or refuse to distribute binaries because the MP3 suite of patents _is_ actively enforced. Try going out and finding unlicensed implementations outside the Free Software and Open Source worlds. That out of the way, I will address the issues raised below. > > > If I were defending, say, an Ogg/Vorbis implementation [...] I > > > would argue that a wavelet transform is sufficiently different [...] > > > > Wavelet transforms are not the only thing the format supports, but it > > may be usable to defend a particular encoder. I don't believe there are wavelet transforms in Ogg Vorbis. These are planned for some future incompatible update. > Do you happen to know whether the Xiph.org team has retained competent > counsel to evaluate the possible impact of the Fraunhofer and Sisvel > patent suites on Ogg/Vorbis? (They claim that Ogg/Vorbis is > "patent-and-royalty-free" at http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/ , which > is pretty strong language.) If not, maybe Fluendo would fund the > legal fees -- they seem willing to pay money to random lawyers for > (IMHO, IANAL) dubious opinions and to post the result publicly > (Google: gstreamer Moglen). Before we released Ogg Vorbis beta 1, we did indeed hire a patent specializing attorney to go over the MP3 suite of patents. He only thought it necessary to issue a formal opinion on a single one of these patents. We were advised by him, and other attorney's, that the specifics of this opinion could not be divulged publically. Since that time (around 2000,2001 I believe), I believe several companies have also had lawyers look over this issue. RedHat ships Ogg Vorbis, and they are obviously aware of these patent problems due to their removal of MP3 related software, so I assume they made this decision based on sound legal advice. I don't believe anyone is going to publically share their findings any more than we have for the same reasons our lawyer original gave. New patents come up all the time. No one can afford to keep track of them all, or to have attorney's issue legal opinions on anything related. We have done informal, but educated, analysis on many patents that others have brought to our attention, and never found anything worth troubling a lawyer over. Also, we originally intended the patent-free part of our software, so we based many algorithms on old, widely published results, and avoided many methods that would lead to patent trouble. Many large corporations ship Ogg Vorbis with their products, including Microsoft, RealNetworks, EA Games, and many more. There are plenty of billion dollar companies to go after for infringement, should infringement actually be occuring due to Ogg Vorbis. The fact the none of these companies has been, to anyone's knowledge, threatened with litigation over related patents speaks volumes. We've been around for 5 years, and we've taken this issue seriously the entire time. > Personally, I would be little more inclined to rely on the continued > availability of royalty-free open-source Ogg/Vorbis encoders than > their MP3 equivalents without some indication that someone competent > is on record as to the basis for a reasonable belief that they do not > infringe the Fraunhofer suite. What I have said above we thought was common knowledge. There are probably very few Free Software projects that have dealt with this issue as seriously as Xiph.org. One last note: I am still on the board of the Xiph.org Foundation, but Monty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is currently the Executive Director. Tom Rosedale is our current legal counsel, but was not the attorney who did the patent review, nor was he actively involved with us at the time the patent review was done. Feel free to continue copying me on the discussion. As a fellow debian developer, I'm quite interested in this issue from both sides. jack. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]