[vorbis] Low bitrate: when?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 03:56:26PM -0400, Keith Wright wrote:
> > From: "Patrick Masters" <pmasters at fuse.net>
> > 
> > Well, that seems kind of shitty that he isnt contributing the low
> > bit rate to open source code.
> > >
> > > I am not contributing this low bitrate profile of the Vorbis code
> > > to open source...
> 
> I assume the authors switched from GPL specifically to allow this.

No that was not the intention. The switch was because the LGPL was acting as
a slight deterrent to commercial use (it shouldn't have been, but...) and the
GPL would have provided little to no protection in this case.

The copyrighted encoder source could very easily be rewritten from a high
level description in a matter of days by a skilled team. The real
intellectual value in the Vorbis encoder is in the core techniques used in
the format.

Unfortunately, these are not protectable by the GPL or otherwise. Copyright
doesn't guard ideas, and there is too much 'obviousness' and prior-art to
justify patenting them.

Furthermore, such decoder-compatible lowbitrate modes could very well be
accomplished without any changes to the encoder, but instead, different
codebooks and/or prefiltering.

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