Hi,
You should have contacted fedora-legal list on that topic. Besides, determining when a patent expires is not that easy and Fedora Legal is backed by skilled lawyers that said the contrary. Unless Fedora Legal confirms your theory (which I doubt), it's useless to discuss this on this list.
Regards, H.
On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 8:38 AM, Haïkel hguemar@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Besides, determining when a patent expires is not that easy and Fedora Legal is backed by skilled lawyers that said the contrary. Unless Fedora Legal confirms your theory (which I doubt), it's useless to discuss this on this list.
Yeah, this is an issue for Fedora-Legal list, but is interesting nonetheless. Looked like from the previous email that there were still a few patents that don't expire until 2017. The first thing that actually popped into my mind was the argument that was always used about Vorbis, i.e. "businesses are afraid to use it because of potential infringement issues" - which I always thought was just a bunch of FUD. That said, if MP3 patents are expiring what is now the excuse for people not using Vorbis? It's obviously a better solution and uses less bandwidth for the same or better quality.
People have moved past vorbis and into the world of Opus. Even MP3 is more for the vast amounts of legacy content - most current content will be AACL.
Saying that, as a no-lawyer, it did seem last time that I looked that many remaining patents after September 2015 were for encoding processes, but as always the actual lawyers who have had a chance to research this would know better and for the rest of us, it isnt too too much of an encumberance.
On 15 November 2015 at 16:54, Gerald B. Cox gbcox@bzb.us wrote:
On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 8:38 AM, Haïkel hguemar@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Besides, determining when a patent expires is not that easy and Fedora Legal is backed by skilled lawyers that said the contrary. Unless Fedora Legal confirms your theory (which I doubt), it's useless to discuss this on this list.
Yeah, this is an issue for Fedora-Legal list, but is interesting nonetheless. Looked like from the previous email that there were still a few patents that don't expire until 2017. The first thing that actually popped into my mind was the argument that was always used about Vorbis, i.e. "businesses are afraid to use it because of potential infringement issues" - which I always thought was just a bunch of FUD. That said, if MP3 patents are expiring what is now the excuse for people not using Vorbis? It's obviously a better solution and uses less bandwidth for the same or better quality.
-- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Naheem Zaffar naheemzaffar@gmail.com wrote:
People have moved past vorbis and into the world of Opus. Even MP3 is more for the vast amounts of legacy content - most current content will be AACL.
My understand is that Opus excels at lower bitrates; above 100 Vorbis is better. In any event, are the same FUD tactics that were used against Vorbis applying to Opus - and with the expiration of the MP3 patents I would think those arguments would now be moot... but I'm sure there will always be some excuse.
On 11/15/2015 10:34 AM, Gerald B. Cox wrote:
My understand is that Opus excels at lower bitrates; above 100 Vorbis is better.
Opus is always better - but at high bitrates, artifacts become so imperceptible that it doesn't matter too much which codec you pick, so you might still pick Vorbis for greater compatibility.
In any event, are the same FUD tactics that were used against Vorbis applying to Opus - and with the expiration of the MP3 patents I would think those arguments would now be moot... but I'm sure there will always be some excuse.
As has been seen, the threats against Vorbis were all hollow. If your claims are baseless, it doesn't matter if the unspecified patents are expired or not :)
In general, Opus adoption has been very fast compared to Vorbis because it is vastly better than other options in the low-delay niche, and is mandatory for WebRTC.