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The MP3 Format is now Patent Free

posted by martyb on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the lets-party-like-its-1999 dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

MP3 decoding was already free and got recently included in Fedora. But now, encoding is also free according to Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS: "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated." The Wikipedia MP3 article confirms that.

So, do you still use an MP3 library or have you switched to another format or means of listening to music such as (spying built-in) streaming services?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:27PM (#504325)

    The music industry is run by some of the sharpest businessmen around, and yet even they got played for fools by Steve Jobs when he negotiated rights for the iTunes Music Store. He was an awful human being, but he is also the sole reason why music and (only music! no other media) was available DRM-free for a while.

    You can be damn sure that the other media industries took note, and are never going to allow un-DRMed distribution channels to gain a foothold ever again.