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Legal status of Rockbox and MP3

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Gnostic:
...

Llorean:

--- Quote from: "Wikipedia" ---Additionally, patent holders declined to enforce license fees on open source decoders, allowing many free MP3 decoders to develop. Furthermore, while attempts have been made to discourage distribution of encoder binaries, Thomson has stated that individuals using free MP3 encoders are not required to pay fees. Thus while patent fees have been an issue for companies attempting to use MP3, they have not meaningfully impacted users, allowing the format to grow in popularity.

--- End quote ---

saratoga:
Furthermore, licenses for hardware devices are typically per device, so in theory Thompson and Co have already collected their fee when you pay for the hardware.

Though I'm very glad they're accepting of open source development too since they could certainly make our lives more difficult if they wanted to.

Llorean:
I'm not sure if that applies to the software codec players. It really depends on whether they were licensed as MP3 playing devices, or devices that run MP3 playing software.

saratoga:
I believe that any device thats not running on a PC has to be licensed as hardware, which has a different pricing structure.  I think the software platform thing doesn't really matter since all MP3 decoders are "software"; the MP3 spec is impractical to implement as a state machine or hardware pipeline because of the many different features in it (stereo modes, block sizes, frame sizes, etc).  I believe the determining factor is how open the platform is (PC verses DAP/DVD player/whatever.  

This is from memory though, its been ages since I looked at the license.

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