[Open-graphics] Re: Patents

[luc]

Le jeudi 07 septembre 2006 à 11:26 -0700, James Richard Tyrer a écrit :
> Lourens Veen wrote:
> > I don't think anyone but Apple could sell a music player without mp3
> > support actually.
> 
> Currently true.  But, with Apple having a large share of the player
> market, AAC is still significant competition to MP3.  
> The question is 
> will people buy non-iPod players that only support MP3 since it is now 
> considered to be an obsolete standard by the MPEG.  MP3 will not decline 
> till other newer systems have significant market penetration.  But, this 
> does not mean that there isn't significant competition to MP3 currently.
Not exactly, because the iPod plays as well the MP3 file format. It
would be more exact to say that Apple has locked the "usage" of the AAC
file format (understand that a non-iPod AAC player can't read the AAC
files from iTunes Store) but don't compete against the MP3 file format.