b2evolution at cbrunning.net

Link: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-audio-format-matters.html

An invitation to audio producers to use Ogg
Vorbis alongside MP3

by Karl Fogel

If you produce audio for general distribution, you probably spend 99.9% of your time thinking about form, content, and production quality, and 0.1% thinking about what audio format to distribute your recordings in.

And in an ideal world, this would be fine. Audio formats would be like the conventions of laying out a book, or like pitches and other building-blocks of music: containers of meaning, available for anyone to use, free of restrictions. You wouldn't have to worry about the consequences of distributing your material in MP3 format, any more than you would worry about putting a page number at the top of a page, or starting a book with a table of contents.

Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. MP3 is a patented format. What this means is that various companies have government-granted monopolies over certain aspects of the MP3 standard, such that whenever someone creates or listens to an MP3 file, even with software not written by one of those companies, the companies have the right to decide whether or not to permit that use of MP3. Typically what they do is demand money, of course. But the terms are entirely up to them: they can forbid you from using MP3 at all, if they want. If you've been using MP3 files and didn't know about this situation, then either a) someone else, usually a software maker, has been paying the royalties for you, or b) you've been unknowingly infringing on patents, and in theory could be sued for it.

The harm here goes deeper than just the danger to you. A software patent grants one party the exclusive right to use a certain mathematical fact. This right can then be bought and sold, even litigated over like a piece of property, and you can never predict what a new owner might do with it. This is not just an abstract possibility: MP3 patents have been the subject of multiple lawsuits, with damages totalling more than a billion dollars.

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