[Vorbis-dev] radioheads new album download and free formats advocacy

[zmachine]

I'm forwarding the email I sent to the radiohead website support ,
asking  that they consider using open formats, as sugested In the
#vorbis irc channel I posted this in the wiki to serve as a basis for a
more thought out and articulated draft for a email campaing, pettion,
and as monty suggested I'm also forwarding it here, to see if we
organize a petition/email campaign to get their attention and let them
realize they have the opportunity to change the rules of the game a lot
more than they realize, well anyway here are the contents of the wiki, I
hope someone can use this to make a proper draft in time to gain
critical mass before the release
thank you

>
>   Radiohead album advocacy
>
>
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>
> Good afternoon, I would like to place / already placed (people who
> already placed should probably email the final text with their order
> number to their email support address ) a pre-order for the radiohead
> download album but since I am an open-source user and a strong
> supporter of open formats, I would like to know if it you could
> possibly inform me of the digital format used in the download, I
> understand that while MP3 has a wider market acceptance, it is covered
> by patents and of inferior quality than the Vorbis format, and of
> vastly inferior quality than the full lossless encoding of the FLAC
> format.
>
> Also although software patents are still invalid in Europe, in the
> united states and other such countries the patents concerning the mp3
> format make it technically illegal for Linux/open source users to use
> the mp3 codecs in order to listen to an mp3 download.
>
> A FLAC file however can be legally distributed and used without
> restrictions and there are free tools which allow anyone to transcode
> into their preferred lossy format to be used in their portable player,
> also FLAC is already supported by almost all players and is a de facto
> industry standard.
>
> Also although Apple has kept their users choice of codec artificially
> limited, there exists an alternative software for the ipod series and
> a number of several other digital audio players which adds support for
> nearly all codecs in existence and which is available free of charge
> as an open source project. You can find more information about this at
> http://rockbox.org
>
> Also I would like to know if it would be possible to make the phone
> mobile number and the street address fields not mandatory for the
> download only option.
>
> Thank you for your time, kind regards,
>

the text is here at the wiki
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Radiohead_album_advocacy