VanLUG Email Archive
Ken Moren (kenm@pc-1861.bc.rogers.wave.ca)
Tue, 20 Oct 1998 23:38:20 -0700 (PDT)
On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Jonathan Walther wrote:
>
> BladeEnc is an excellent program. Look for it on freshmeat. And hurry up
> and download it before that stupid patent violation thingy mentioned on
> slashdot results in the disappearance of this fine program. (doesn't
> just affect this program, but all free mp3 encoders)
>
Well, maybe not this one (see below), but I downloaded it anyway :)
On the BladeEnc page (http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/) I found this
item:
> Some of you have probably heard about the letter that Fraunhofer has
> sent to me and other creators of freeware/shareware MP3 encoders.This
> letter states that Fraunhofer and THOMSON have some certain key patent
> rights regarding MP3 and that you therefore needs a (extremely
> expensive) license in order to create an MP3 encoder,
> no matter if it's freeware or not. A copy of the letter can be found on
> MP3.com.
>
> This gave the result that most of my colleagues immediatelly removed
> their products from their homepages and ceased to develop them. A lot of
> MP3 enthusiasts got quite angry with Fraunhofer (to say the least) for
> marketing MP3 as an open standard and then when the userbase is big
> enough start to request $15 for every distributed encoder.
>
> However, this situation doesn't affect BladeEnc since swedish
> legislation specifically states that patents regarding mathematical
> algorithms or software implementations are NOT valid or enforceable in
> Sweden. I suspect that the same goes for quite a number of countries
> since these kinds of patents are very questionable.
>
> I also sent a letter to Fraunhofer, politely asking them to specify
> what patents my product was infringing. I also ended the letter by
> saying that "If a license is needed I hope we can work something out".
> They haven't bothered to reply yet (I sent it one and a half week ago),
> so I suspect they recognised that they were a bit far out here and just
> tried to get rid of some unwanted competition. :-(
>
> My advice to all other freeware encoder authors is therefore to check
> what your countries legislation says about this. You can also check if
> your legislation specifically states that patents regulates the
> commercial use of a technique. If it does you might still be able to
> continue as long as you don't get any income from your product, but I'm
> not certain about that.
Cool, eh wot?
Regards, Linux fellows!
Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Mon 02 Nov 1998 - 03:23:18 PST