[WikiEN-l] Re: Should MP3 files be allowed on wikipedia - Current ongoing discussion.

Sat Jul 17 13:12:33 UTC 2004

Or other free formats for that matter, Speex or FLAC

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 13:41:29 +0100, Neil Harris
<usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
> 
> > Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> >
> >> The situation with MP3 is, as I understand it, much
> >> worse. Here the threat is to both encoders and decoders.
> >
> >
> > Audacity (free sound editor) has no complaints reading MP3s, but if
> > you try to save as MP3, you get a message box telling you about
> > licensing and patents and how you will have to install the LAME encoder.
> >
> > I really don't think decoding MP3s is covered by patents.
> >
> > Timwi
> >
> I think you'll find that Thomson think otherwise. See
> http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.pdf
> 
> Although they state: "More in general, no license fee is expected for
> desktop software decoders/players that are
> distributed free-of-charge for personal use." (Section 2.1.1, page 4),
> this does not appear to cover other possible Wikipedia uses such as
> access to Wikipedia over mobile devices running free software. Until
> there is a clear royalty-free patent licence grant for MP3 decoding by
> free software, I suggest we go with raw soundfiles or Ogg Vorbis.
> 
> -- Neil
> 
> 
> 
> 
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