I'd imagine one reason Apple pulled support for MP3 from the QT API was the software patents held by Frauhoffer in several countries (including Germany and the US). From what I understand of the situation Frauhoffer are 'entitled' to (and enforce) a fee for every 'MP3 encoder' distributed (whether it be for no cost or not).
Unfortunately, the legal issues surrounding the incorporation of support for MP3 encoding/decoding in the engine are muddy at best and would probably require many hours of a patent lawyer's time to correctly determine.
On my planet we have a rule: If you keep silent about your patent and only choose to enforce _after_ you've seduced the entire world into using your work, that's recognized as bait-and-switch and your patent awarded to the public domain.
We've seen this with GIF, JPEG, and now MP3. Where is the patent holder with the honesty to enforce a patent _before_ tens of millions of people invest in it?
Thank gawd Compton's was backed down, or we'd all be paying them royalties everytime we backup with two or more different file formats on the CD....
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
