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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

MP3 seems to be one of the cases where patents seem to have not hindered the spread of information. The inventor made a small amount of money, and decodes and encoders proliferated. MP3 dominated music. And there's no shortage of open source (which, I know, is not what RMS wants) code available.

This is not the catastrophic situation that I was told to expect from patentable file formats.

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For many years, nobody shipped implementations of MP3 at all; there are still Linux distributions today that don't provide support for MP3 out of the box. Many don't support MP4/h264, either.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and...

"MP3 license revenues generated about €100 million for the Fraunhofer Society in 2005."

Is that small amount of money ?

Compared to the value of the music/audio distributed through mp3? I'd say that's a pittance.

Buying a complete set of codecs from Fluendo for Linux costs 20$. That includes Windows Media, h264 and others. That's not too much I think.

http://www.oneplaydirect.com/oneplay/oneplay-codec-pack/

In fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia:

> Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11]

This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.

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