[Vorbis] patent issues with Vorbis

[Ralph Giles]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 03:31:32PM +0530, KumarBraj Bhushan wrote:

> We are in the business of developing/productizing Multimedia codecs for embedded systems. Recently, Vorbis has gained good popularity. We are also developing it.

Glad to hear this! We're always happy to see new adopters.

> But we face few problems related to patents. Vorbis claims to be patent free. Is there any particular search made for possible patent infringements and corresponding report published? We need to convince our customers sometime about this issue.

I'm not aware of any published report. It is my understanding that 
patent searches are strategically more valuable when kept private.
Xiph has followed this advice from its legal councel, as it seems
AOL did with their alleged search. Our advice to organizations 
concerned about the patent issues is to perform their own search 
and otherwise obtain a legal opinion to evaluate their risk.

> I have started with patents listed on the website of "www.mp3licensing.com". Some of them are very generic and it appears as if Vorbis code might be infringing upon few of them. They are (with their patent numbers and titles) :

In general, Vorbis uses alternate methods to the ones described in these 
patents.

 -r