<story><title>The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated</title><url>https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TD-Linux</author><text>Not believing in software patents is unlikely to change a court&amp;#x27;s mind. Instead, support formats that are royalty free from the start - Vorbis, Opus, and Codec2, for example.</text></item><item><author>notaplumber</author><text>Recognizing this adds legitimacy to software patents. Don&amp;#x27;t. There have been free and open source MP3 decoders for many years now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JulianMorrison</author><text>The major trouble with patents, and the thing that puts them in a special category of nuisance all of their own, is that it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;fundamentally impossible&lt;/i&gt; to know that a thing is unencumbered until each particular claim to the contrary has been hashed out in court, at ruinous expense. And there is no legal proscription against patent owners letting you think you were safe for years, and then popping up to cream off the fruits of your work. We know MP3 &lt;i&gt;was&lt;/i&gt; encumbered. We don&amp;#x27;t, and can&amp;#x27;t, know that MP3, Vorbis, and so forth aren&amp;#x27;t encumbered now. All we can know is that nobody has popped up to hold the industry to ransom... yet.</text></comment>
<story><title>The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated</title><url>https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TD-Linux</author><text>Not believing in software patents is unlikely to change a court&amp;#x27;s mind. Instead, support formats that are royalty free from the start - Vorbis, Opus, and Codec2, for example.</text></item><item><author>notaplumber</author><text>Recognizing this adds legitimacy to software patents. Don&amp;#x27;t. There have been free and open source MP3 decoders for many years now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway91111</author><text>How do you &amp;quot;support a format&amp;quot;? AFAIK nothing will convince Apple to release music in a better (patent-free) codec, much less convince others to dump DRM.</text></comment>