[vorbis] Fruanhofer patents and royalties for Streaming

[Segher Boessenkool]

Steven Bailey wrote:
> 
>         Your fear is a legitimate one, I'm afraid, provided a few details.  I'm

I don't think Fraunhofer has any patents on streaming audio. They _do_ have
patents on MPEG Layer III (with some rather trivial claims, which are a
bit hard to circumvent in an audio coder, especially an MPEG one; but it's
possible), so they can ask money for streaming mp3.

> that the patent office cannot just tell them, "Your claim is b--- s---,"
> then the claim will go to court.  Even if you are right and they are

The main Fraunhofer patents are: 1) using salefactors, 2) FhG's specific
psycho-acoustic model (part of it; the ISO example encoder, as well as
LAME, violate this patent). So Vorbis is clean :-) I'll do a bigger
patent search later, you people got me worried.

> a good thing.  I don't care that much about when "this feature" or "that
> feature" gets released.  (*I'm* not the one busting my tail trying to
> put it all together from scratch.  :)- )  I just would hate to see your
> project caught in a legal fracas that could probably be avoided.

If we don't break patents, we are ok; but if you don't want to be
taken to court by stupid patent claims, the only way to do that is
to just pay the bullies, I'm afraid.

Dagdag,

Segher

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