[vorbis] Are mp3 royalties inherited by ogg?

[Michael Smith]

At 11:58 AM 9/7/00 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>The vorbis codec is patent and royalty-free, but for mp3
>one should in principle pay royalties to Fraunhofer
>institute ($0.05 or so ?) for each song recorded.
>
>But what about .ogg files that are made out of .mp3 files?
>Does the royalty then somehow inherit to the .ogg file?
>
>Just a thought...

The royalties are because of various patents on mp3 (and the mp3 encoding
process) - not on the contents in any way. As a result, any vorbis file
isn't covered by these patents, no matter what the source material was, as
I understand things.

That said, you shouldn't (EVER) be converting mp3 files to vorbis.
Re-encode from the original source material (CD, etc.) instead. Converting
mp3 to vorbis will result in low quality, and really misses the point.

Michael

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