[Advocacy] persuading mobile phone manufacturers to implement Vorbis support

[Tor-Einar Jarnbjo]

Matthew Flaschen schrieb:
>> bring people to use Vorbis instead of MP3 by bashing on MP3, partly with
>> invalid statements (you don't have to pay licensing fees for giving away
>> MP3 files)
>>     
>
> You do if you generate revenue through that distribution
> (http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html).  But where does the FSF say
> that?
>   
They write in their press release: "... any time a distributor sells or 
gives away music encoded as an MP3, they are responsible for paying a 
fee to the owners of the MP3 patents." It's difficult to interpret it 
any other way than sell = "generate revenue" and give avay = "not 
generating revenue". You also only have to pay license fees if you 
generate a revenue of more than US$ 100,000/year.
>> What happened to Microsoft as someone showed up and claimed that
>> Microsoft violates one of their patents by using MP3 technology can 
>> just as well happen to someone using Vorbis
>>     
>
> Maybe.  But if that does happen (if the claim can not be defeated), I
> will move on to a new format, and I think the FSF will do the same.
>   
But if the claim is ruled valid, it is too late for whoever has been sued.
>> After all, Vorbis is "under the hood" not _that_ different from
>> MP3 and many people seem to expect the MP3 patents to just cover the
>> bitstream format and not the actual technologies being used.
>>     
>
> How can a patent not be specific to the actual technologies being used?
>   
I don't know, but the general consensus among many Vorbis promoters is 
that "MP3 is patented, Vorbis is not". To the best, this is an extremely 
simplified version of the truth. MP3, seen as a file format, is as such 
not patented, but many distinct intermediate steps performed by the 
encoder and decoder are patented as specific technologies. If you 
compare MP3 and Vorbis, many of these steps are identical or at least 
very similar and I have a hard time believing that a well paid lawyer 
would not be able to convince a court that some of the technologies used 
by Vorbis are covered by patents.

Tor