[Foundation-l] MP3 and OGG

Sat Jun 4 22:30:41 UTC 2005

On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 20:03 +0200, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> I am willing to defer on this issue to Debian.  Can anyone report on
> whether or not MP3s can be created and played with software that Debian
> has in their 'free' category?

Fraunhofer, the owners of the mp3 patents, claim $0.75 royalties per
decoder sold; they explicitly say that this fee is waived for "free
software distributed over the Internet", but that does mean that Linux
distributions on CD or sold by other means cannot include MP3 decoders
without triggering the fee, but they can point users to where free
decoders can be downloaded.

Whether their claim has any legal validity is another issue entirely.

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>  <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>