> This is an area we've been looking at in the 64 Studio project, due to > the patent licensing problems of MP3 decoders, required by all fully > functional Flash players of course. Gstreamer now has a legal MP3 > plug-in available, from the Fluendo website, and the source of that is > available in Debian.
I thought MP3 *de*coders got a royalty-free patent license (to encourage use of the format) while MP3 *en*coders got soaked for a fee. Is there a definitive place where the MP3 patent situation vis-a-vis free and open software is authoritatively described? > (and I'm not a lawyer). Maybe I'm asking the wrong guy. Let's do some web searching. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2005-February/msg00040.html This email response from the mp3licensing.com folks at Thompson says that "We do allow non-commercial use of our patents. However, the GPL and LGPL software allow onward distribution that can easily be non-commercial." Thus if your distribution or use of MP3 code is non-commercial, it's apparently not a problem...but don't take my word for it... http://www.mp3licensing.com is where to look for commercial licenses to the MP3 patents. (There are apparently a few other fly-by-night companies that go around and try to shake down MP3 companies for additional patent licenses, but as far as I know, nobody who's ignored them has been sued or further harassed. In other words, the other claimed patent holders are likely to be scammers.) This page: http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html lists the patents that they license out. You can get a fully paid up license for PC software for an MP3 decoder for US$60,000 and no per-unit royalties. So if some GPL'd software product like Gnash or Gstreamer wanted to buy such a license, both non-commercial and commercial use of the software would be paid for. Also see this page: http://www.mp3licensing.com/mp3/mp3pro.html ... Additionally, Gracenote and Thomson are offering unprecedented pricing to all developers. Non-commercial software developers can license a CDDB/mp3PRO decoding/mp3-encoding package on a royalty-free basis, and commercial applications will have access to royalty-free mp3PRO decoding. MP3PRO is a superset of MP3; it supposedly decodes ordinary MP3 files to produce identical output compared to an MP3 player. So, if our application is only doing output in MP3 (gnash), and the non-monetary terms of this license aren't ridiculous, we should be able to get a valid license for no money at all. (Of course we would ignore the CDDB half of the license; Gracenote is the scum of the earth. They took a GPL'd product, used it to collect information contributed by thousands of end users, and then took that database of information private. And then they modified the over-the-net protocol, to force developers to sign a license promising never to use any other CD-information service. Instead, developers switched to FreeDB, whose database of user-contributed information is GPL'd.) John _______________________________________________ Gnash mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash
