Vorbis - Dec 2000 - Fruanhofer patents and royalties for Streaming

Everyone involved in the Vorbis project should get their A into G and 
get streaming worked out before the 1st of Jan, so that when Fruanhofer 
start cracking down on streaming MP3, there's a good, workable 
alternative to switch to :)
This includes the plugins and such

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Daniel Richards wrote:
> 
> Everyone involved in the Vorbis project should get their A into G and
> get streaming worked out before the 1st of Jan, so that when Fruanhofer
> start cracking down on streaming MP3, there's a good, workable
> alternative to switch to :)
> This includes the plugins and such
Do it yourself. Please. Or try to sound a bit nicer. You are being rude.
We all do the work for free, giving considerable amounts of time and effort
to the project. You only want to have free stuff. If you want good, streaming
audio, and (as you say so yourself) mp3 is the only thing that delivers it,
just pay them. That's how the world works; you don't like it, just
change it.
(Or at least try to). Btw, your talking to the wrong people here; Vorbis _is_
already streaming, maybe your favourite tool doesn't support it yet, but you
should speak to the makers of that tool to get it supported, not to us.

Sorry if I sound harsh,

Segher

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Segher Boessenkool <segher@wanadoo.nl> writes:
> If we don't break patents, we are ok; but if you don't want to be
taken to
> court by stupid patent claims, the only way to do that is to just pay the
> bullies, I'm afraid.
>From this recent article
  http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4101023.html?tag=st.ne.1002.tgif.ni

comes this quote

   "We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson
   intellectual property," Linde said. "We think it is likely they are
   infringing."

(Linde is a Fraunhofer VP.)

This could just be FUD, but considering their scumbag behavior up to this
point, it seems to me virtually certain that they will eventually go after
vorbis.  The fact that there's not a primary large corporation to sue may
make
this harder in some ways, but it will make things a lot easier in others.  If
there are only individuals, many can be crushed just by the threat of a
lawsuit, no matter how baseless.

I've not (yet) contributed to vorbis, but even a small judgement would
probably bankrupt me.  I could bear this personally, but having dependents
would make it much harder.

Vorbis has tremendous potential to benefit humanity, not to mention a large
number of existing corporations.  The best defense, if possible, would be to
get some of these future beneficiaries to stand up to Fraunhofer.

--Mike


-- 
[O]ne of the features of the Internet [...] is that small groups of people can
greatly disturb large organizations.  --Charles C. Mann

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