Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te...
by URSpider94 on Monday May 01, 2017 @11:15PM
(#14243701)
I think you are confusing the issues. TFA is about the license fees paid to Fraunhofer for the MP3 codec, for which they owned the underlying and now-expired patents.
MP3 is not an encrypted codec, the format itself is quite open and doesn't place any real restrictions on redistributing music -- in fact, most of the original music sharing sites like Napster traded exclusively in MP3. The use of MP3 has no bearing on copyright or music piracy.
The real issue is that software developers had to pay a royalty to Fraunhofer to distribute copies of MP3 players or encoders. That made it impossible to incorporate MP3 into a free (as in speech) OS like GNU/Linux.
Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te...
by thisrod on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @02:58AM
(#14244472)
> The real issue
There's real a higher-order issue, too. Why did anyone want GNU to incorporate an MP3 player in the first place? There is no law of physics that requires songs to be encoded as MP3.
That seems to get a lot of incentives right. Publishers have to pay artists decent royalties, and proprietary file formats can't be used to suppress competition. What would go wrong? Apart from the fact that this would have to be enacted over the cold, dead bodies of a lot of music company executives: that's a feature, not a bug.