Brian's Brain

Thanks to Ron for covering the recent court decision granting Alcatel-Lucent over $1.5 billion USD in fines from Microsoft for MP3 patent infringement. I'm predicting that Microsoft will appeal and that the fine, assuming the decision stands after review at all (arguably, Alcatel-Lucent should be sueing Fraunhofer, not Fraunhofer's licensees), will be greatly reduced. Microsoft did, after all, license MP3 patents, from Fraunhofer....they just apparently (and intentionally or not) didn't get them all. Ironically, Jim Johnson, who was a key developer of the PAC lossy audio compression algorithm at Bell Labs that predated and formed the foundation of AT&T's (now Alcatel-Lucent's) patent claims, now works in Microsoft's audio group!

Regardless of what happens in the long term, Alcatel-Lucent's court victory and the subsequent possibility of other lawsuits against other companies have put a definite chill on the digital audio market. This is a perfect opportunity for me to point you to a Slashdot post entitled Ogg Vorbis Gaining Industry Support that's been sitting in my 'To Be Written' folder ever since I saw it. Microsoft's days-back legal setback is exactly the kind of scenario that inspired me to archive it away three weeks ago; folks, there's a reason why I periodically cover open-source audio codecs like (lossy) Vorbis and (lossless) FLAC.

Lack of broadbase support for second-tier, more obscure codecs is only a problem when the audio data needs to be widely distributed. Conversely, in a black-box application, or even in a networked but still closed system (think, for example, of a proprietary VoIP application, where Speex may be more appropriate), any codec is potentially a candidate as long as you can cobble together the necessary encode (including, if necessary, metadata), broadcast, transport, distribution and reception, and decode support (in software and/or dedicated hardware). The same holds true for video; see Theora, for example, whose developers at Xiph have now taken over ownership of another open-source codec, On2 Technologies' VP3.2. This all assumes, of course, that Xiph's work stands up to patent infringement scrutiny, something that to the best of my knowledge hasn't yet occurred.

Set your bits free. Don't feed the lawyers. 'Nuff said.

More on the court decision from Ars Technica, Slashdot and Wired.