There are many examples of patent trolls but this isn't one. MP3 was new, innovative, and the result of long effort. The patent fees directly funded new research of even better technology. That's the patent system working as designed.

I just read your blog post through Google Translate. You seem to claim that they patented the use of Fourier transform for storage of music. This is not what happened at all. The patent was granted for specifying which part of the Fourier transform can safely be discarded for storage (and reconstructed while playback) without harming the sound you hear too much. That's not something they just looked up in a 200-year-old book but took more than a decade of complex research. The result of this research is their actual product and it's a highly valuable one.

I'm a person who oppose all kind of software patents. any use of software patents is a patent troll (if you have patent, you should have a clear patent policy that it's for defensive purpose).

According to the case of Bilski, patents should involve a machine, otherwise it's invalid. But trolls don't care of their patents are invalid, because of how patent cases are handled in courts

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20081102011538...

Your political stance doesn't change that what you wrote is simply wrong. They did not get a patent for the Fourier transform but for something completely new which no one thought of before.

Fraunhofer would not have developed audio compression if they couldn't earn money with it (they are a non-profit by the way and the money earned funds new research). That's their business model. They have novel ideas, do hard work to make them possible, and sell that to companies. Are you suggesting people shouldn't get paid to do their work?

Algorithms are the machines of the 21st century.

The court rule in Bilski case, does not agree with you. You can't patent math. It's not my political stance, it's the law. You are not supposed to patent formulas.

The Fraunhofer Society is not and never was a "patent troll". They do actual research and one of their income sources is licensing the resulting patents.

Fraunhofer put the source online without a license at the ISO site, let the community convince itself that MP3 was a standard and therefore unpatented, let the community write all the encoders and decoders and surrounding tools for years, then turned around and asked everyone who made their file format popular for 10K USD.

Troll is a gentle word, the author of ffmpeg describe patents of software as "gangsters asking for protection money". All software patents are bad see my reply above

http://web.archive.org/web/20070927224154/ffmpeg.mplayerhq.h...

It's not really a business of patent trolls.

It's the unfortunate effect that the German research organisation that developed it only finances all their research with patents.