[vorbis-dev] patents and separate entropy coding

[Davy Durham]

I have an idea....    Break the encoder into 2 'separate' projects.....

One project (named 'O')  takes PCM audio and transforms it into the frequecy
domain....  Great...

The other project (name 'gg') takes frequecy domain *data* and performs entropy
encoding on it... Great again....

Noone will actually want to use each project separately (well, they might)....
But the normal user will always use the two separate projects in succession.....
And no one here is at fault for that....

Problem solved: ;)
    --Davy

Then another totally separate project

Lourens Veen wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> first of all, I searched through the archives for any posts resembling
> this, I didn't read all posts about the patents so if this has been
> suggested before I apologise.
>
> I read in an article on C|Net (I think, it was linked from Slashdot
> anyway) that Thompson are threatening to sue you if Ogg Vorbis becomes a
> success. Which is evil, and I'm also mad at them because they never
> answered my mail (which was about how to get an mp3 patent license, of
> all things). But I digress.
>
> Thing is, I understand that they have a patent on compressing audio by
> transforming to the frequency domain, quantising, and then entropy
> encoding, which is what Ogg Vorbis does, so there's trouble. Now, I've
> been working on a Haar wavelet image compressor, and since I haven't
> written the entropy coder yet I just dump my quantised output to a new
> file. This file is as large as the original file. Then I simply use
> gzip, which compresses well because of the preprocessing.
>
> So, should trouble arise, you could make Ogg Vorbis from a compressor
> into a transformer. Since you're not doing any entropy encoding, in fact
> you're not even compressing anything, they won't have anything against
> you.
>
> There may be a problem with this, which is that it may in fact then be
> illegal to create .ogg.gz files without a license from them, but it
> would be pretty hard for them to hold that since they don't have any
> patents on transforming audio data or on entropy encoding random data,
> just the combination.
>
> Well, IANAL, but I thought that it might be useful.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Lourens
>
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