I'm sure you've heard the news that Microsoft must pay $1.5B as the result of a lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent. You can read about it, but it sure is a good lesson. You better do your homework before licensing patents.
I encourage everyone to look into the use of Vorbis Ogg format. First, it sounds very good. And it's patent free! From the xiph website:
Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), WMA and PAC.
Why don' t podcasters use this format? It's free, and it's easy for users to obtain the decoder if they don't already have it. In fact, why doesn't everyone use this format? (Heck, even my company's demos are in MP3... must change that.)
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Audio
Comments (2)
Read More Entries by Brad Fuller.
This lawsuit makes me wonder why Fraunhoffer, who charges licensing fees for the use of MPEG layer 3, doesn't have to pay the royalty fees to Alcatel-Lucent for basically 'reselling' the underlying technology? For that matter, when will one of these corporate giants decide that they own the patent on all 'audio/video encoding' technology because the original basic idea belonged to them?
I encourage everyone to look into the use of Vorbis Ogg format. First, it sounds very good. And it's patent free!