Re: [Gnash] gstreamer plugin

[Daniel James]

Hi John,

> I thought MP3 *de*coders got a royalty-free patent license (to encourage
> use of the format) while MP3 *en*coders got soaked for a fee.

I think that's a common misperception, since the the patent holders do 
charge for decoders also. More like they don't enforce the decoder 
royalties as much as the encoder royalties, because they know that MP3 
can't survive as a de-facto standard without the decoders remaining 
ubiquitous. If they had a mass crack-down on unlicensed decoders then 
all those Chinese-made gadgets might switch to supporting royalty-free 
formats, such as Vorbis and FLAC.

> Is there
> a definitive place where the MP3 patent situation vis-a-vis free and open
> software is authoritatively described?

This is quite a good summary:

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/faq/html/chapter-legal.html

> This email response from the mp3licensing.com folks at Thompson says
> that "We do allow non-commercial use of our patents.  However, the GPL
> and LGPL software allow onward distribution that can easily be
> non-commercial."
>
> Thus if your distribution or use of MP3 code is non-commercial, it's
> apparently not a problem

That's not how I read that email. These are the lines I take issue with:

"Without the patents, there would be no GPL or LGPL mp3 software."

This implies that any free software developer who has written 
MP3-related software must have been aware of the patents and have 
examined them closely.

"We are not prepared to issue and irrevocable, free patent license to 
GPL and LGPL software using our patents."

This means MP3 will never be free software compatible.

"We do allow non-commercial use of our patents.  However, the GPL and 
LGPL software allow onward distribution that can easily be non-commercial."

In other words, the minute we interpret your free software project as 
commercial, we'll take legal action.

This isn't a licence, its a vague suggestion that you might get away 
with it as long as they don't think you have any money. Practically, 
it's an impossible situation for free software, because it always passes 
through the hands of a commercial organisation at some point.

For example, the Linux magazine that I edit has a free DVD or CD on the 
cover each month. Clearly, the cover disc is part of the value of the 
magazine for readers - so is that commercial distribution?

> You can get a fully paid up
> license for PC software for an MP3 decoder for US$60,000 and no per-unit
> royalties.  So if some GPL'd software product like Gnash or Gstreamer
> wanted to buy such a license, both non-commercial and commercial use
> of the software would be paid for.

But then you'd be infringing the GPL, because the patent licence almost 
certainly won't be GPL compatible. This is why Fluendo have signed the 
MP3 deal, then based their system around an LGPL media player (Totem) 
and binary plugins.

> MP3PRO is a superset of MP3; it supposedly decodes ordinary MP3 files
> to produce identical output compared to an MP3 player.

Therefore the patent holders believe it is covered by the same patents 
as MP3, plus a few more maybe.

The only long-term solution is to lobby Macromedia to include Vorbis 
support into a future open Flash standard. It's in their commercial and 
technical interest to do so, as Vorbis is royalty free, and sounds 
better than MP3 at low bitrates.

Cheers!

Daniel