[vorbis] Winamp5

[Cameron Patrick]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 11:03:51AM -0600, noprivacy at earthlink.net wrote:

| And let's be blunt here.... Xiph can claim all they want that it's patent
| free but in the commercial world, claims like that don't mean anything.
| Somebody is going to have to put in some big bucks to do extensive
| investigation to make sure they wont be likely to get sued.  Hopefully AOL
| is doing that because once they do, then other commercial products might
| decide to include vorbis encoding.

Patents don't work like that, sorry.  My understanding is that almost
every non-trivial piece of code is highly likely to violate a software
patent in the current situation.  Some claim that the best approach for
software developers is to ignore any patents that aren't being actively
enforced, simply because there are so many overly broad software patents
around, many of which the owners don't really care about.  Now Vorbis is
unlikely to be covered by a patent which /is/ being actively enforced,
as if it was, we'd know about it by know (on account of its owner
politely telling Xiph.org to pay up).  Furthermore, large companies like
AOL can generally protect themselves reasonably well from patent
lawsuits, simply because they themselves have many patents which they
can start bandying about in retaliation ("You say we're violating your
patent there?  Well let's see how many patents of /ours/ you're using...
Perhaps we should forget about this whole nasty business.")

I think that any claims that Vorbis is patent-encumbered should be
treated as FUD until they are substantiated.

Cameron.

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.