[Open-graphics] Re: Patents

[Lourens Veen]

On Wednesday 06 September 2006 22:42, luc wrote:
> Le mercredi 06 septembre 2006 à 16:16 -0400, Timothy Miller a écrit :
> > On 9/6/06, luc <lucmars2 at orange.fr> wrote:
> > > > Except for the huge amount of content out there that is in mp3
> > > > format. I'd buy a player that only supports Ogg Vorbis, because
> > > > I don't download music off of today's P2P network, and I have
> > > > all my CDs encoded as Vorbis. But I'm an exception. I don't
> > > > think anyone but Apple could sell a music player without mp3
> > > > support actually.
> > >
> > > Is it the same price to encode in mp3 format than to decode a mp3
> > > file ? In other words, why so much contents in mp3 if the license
> > > is expensive ?
> >
> > Early bird gets the worm?
>
> No of course. Should I conclude that "the first move, take all"
> answers as well to my question, or in you mind, you rather think
> about the responsability of the consumer ?

I think his point was that when MP3 first appeared, there was no 
competition. So, everyone used MP3, and it became the standard. 
Incidentally, back in those days MP3 decoders didn't have to pay 
royalties if they were distributed at no cost. So, nullsoft could give 
away WinAMP without having to pay the MP3 licence-holders.

Since then, new standards have been developed, but since MP3 files still 
sound OK, and especially with todays fast broadband networks are small 
enough, Vorbis and AAC don't really have much of an advantage to the 
customer/illegal downloader. And MP3 is very very well-known.

So, everybody uses MP3, and because of that they buy hardware that 
supports MP3, and because of that they encode their new content in MP3 
(using proprietary software, or using free software without a patent 
licence), and because of that Vorbis and AAC remain outsiders.

Lourens
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