On April 23, 2017, the last patents covering the MP3 audio file format held by the Fraunhofer IIS and Technicolor (former THOMSON) finally expired, thus their licensing program has ended. That’s what Fraunhofer IIS’ website anounces:
On April 23, 2017, Technicolor’s mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated.
We thank all of our licensees for their great support in making mp3 the defacto audio codec in the world, during the past two decades.
The development of mp3 started in the late 80s at Fraunhofer IIS, based on previous development results at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those technologies, that have been developed with major contributions from Fraunhofer IIS, can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3.
Further details about the termination of the mp3 licensing program by Technicolor and Fraunhofer are available here.
There might be computer users out there, who know little about the MP3 Licensing matter. There might be even users out there, who did’t know that MP3 was patented at all.
For those, who don’t now, what the whole MP3 licensing situation was, there is an old ancient article on www.mp3.com (through web.archive.org):
by Michael Robertson, 1998-09-11
September 11th, 1998
Following up on a claim they have had posted to their web site and reiterated at the 1998 MP3 Summit, Fraunhofer sent letters of infringement to a number of MP3 software developers. In the letter, they claim that due to patents they hold related to MP3, they are entitled to royalties for any commercial players, all encoders (whether sold or given away), and also works of art sold in MP3 format.
The letter of infringement had an immediate effect on the free encoder programs with many being removed from their official web site. Affected encoders include Plugger, CDEX, soloH, 8Hz, Blade, Canna, and others. Most of these efforts were built upon the freely available ISO source code on Fraunhofer’s own site.
Fraunhofer is demanding a royalty payment beginning at $25 per encoder. Additionally, a 1% or .01 per file royalty is also put forth as being required. Belows is the exact text of the letter. MP3.com is investigating this situation further and has requested an official response from Fraunhofer.
A quick patent search reveals the following patents 5742735 and 5579430 registered to Fraunhofer and likely dealing with MP3. After reading the original letter sent out below, add your take to the messageboard.
Here is a copy of the letter they are distributing:
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
As you may know, both the Fraunhofer Institute and THOMSON have done important work to develop MPEG Layer-3 audio compression (before and after it became part of the MPEG standards). This work has resulted in many inventions and several patents, covering the MPEG Layer-3 standard.
From your publications and your web-site we learn that you distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders that use the MPEG Layer-3 standard.
Our files do not show that you have a valid license agreement with us. This means that the products infringe the patent rights of Fraunhofer and THOMSON.
To make, sell and/or distribute products using the standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us.
In the past, we have licensed several companies under different models for different products, e.g.:
- Software encoder licenses against a per unit royalty starting at $ 25,00 and decreasing for high volumes; and
- Pay-audio licenses against a royalty of $ 0,01 per song or 1 % of the selling price. At least the Software encoder license seems to apply to your products and we would appreciate if you could send us some more details about your activities, in order to discuss what would be the right royalty structure for your company.In view of the above, we urge you to contact Henri Linde (mailto:lindeh@thmulti.com) and Martin Sieler (mailto:sir@iis.fhg.de) in order to start the discussion of the license or licenses needed.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards,
- Martin---
Martin Sieler
Fraunhofer IIS-A, Audio & Multimedia
email: sir@iis.fhg.de
phone: +49 9131 776-610
fax: +49 9131 776-699
www: http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/
As a result of this, these MP3 encoders went under. (Keep in mind, that most free MP3 encoders a the time, like Plugger, soloH, 8Hz, Blade and Canna were simply compiled versions of the ISO-reference implementation, dist10.) Software programs, whichs primary purpose wasn’t to encode MP3, like the CD-Ripper CDEX flat-out ripped their MP3-support out and switcht to plain old uncompressed WAV files.
This had a massive impact in the Freeware and (then emerging) Open Source world, and it affected to some degree even the users (Actually, every user of a CD-Ripper for example). But before you judge this incident too early, it didn’t have not only negative effects on the community. Retrospectively, this letter brought some public attention to the problem of proprietary or encumbered audio file formats. Furthermore, and ironically, it stimulated the developement of some key infrastructure, we rely on every day, specifically the Ogg Vorbis music format, as well as it’s parent organization Xiph.org. Ogg Vorbis is the primary codec behind Spotify and is used in almost every video game since it became marture in 2002. Speex, also made by the Xiph.org Foundation, is/was used Teamspeak used in online action games.
Without the whole licensing-thing against MP3 software developers, all the good things we have today, Ogg Vorbis, the Xiph.org Foundation and also Opus, the new best-in-class audio codec and IETF-standard wouldn’t have happened. Propably we also wouldn’t have royalty-free video codecs today (like VP8, VP9, AV1, Theora, Daala, etc.).
Now, past April 23, 2017, that the MP3 patents expired and the licensing program ended, it is now legal to write MP3 software again, without being overshaddowed by these patents as before.
While MP3 remains the de facto standard for collections of music files on hard drives and in the internet, neighter Ogg Vorbis, Opus nor AAC have managed yet to supplant it in this field. Though MP3 could be considered a legacy file format, i think it won’t go away any time soon.