[Advocacy] persuading mobile phone manufacturers to implement Vorbis support

[Tor-Einar Jarnbjo]

Alexander van Loon schrieb:
> Are they collaborating with Xiph.org, or are they doing this
> independently?
I really hope that Xiph doesn't have anything to do with this. Trying to 
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) instead of promoting the advantages of Vorbis or scaring them 
from using MP3 by pointing out unclear licensing and patenting issues 
doesn't seem like a good idea to me. 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 and as soon as there is real money to get from companies using 
Vorbis, I bet someone will. Actually, I am rather surprised that noone 
yet has. 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. I am well 
aware that Xiph has done a patent research and has come to the result 
that Vorbis doesn't violate any patents, but even if I just have very 
good technical knowledge about MP3 and Vorbis and not much legal 
knowledge, it is hard to ignore that several of Thomson's patents 
describe technologies very similar, if not completely identical to the 
technologies used by Vorbis. One example is Thomson's patents on a 
"method for transmitting a signal using adaptive window functions" 
(EP0414838/US5,214,742 and EP0464534/US5,321,729) from 1990/1991.

Tor