Members Anderton Posted April 18, 2017 Members Share Posted April 18, 2017 From Wikipedia, whose page was just updated yesterday: If only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding has been patent-free in the US since 22 September 2015 when U.S. Patent 5,812,672 expired which had a PCT filing in October 1992.[70][71][72] If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 when U.S. Patent 6,009,399, held by[73] and administered by Technicolor,[74] expired. If that really is the case, a lot of companies are going to save money on paying licensing fees... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted April 18, 2017 Author Members Share Posted April 18, 2017 Alex Westner contacted MP# Licensing and they said that as of April 23, no license will be required for encoding or decoding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil O'Keefe Posted April 18, 2017 Share Posted April 18, 2017 I wonder if everyone who currently charges for MP3 encoders / decoders will start offering them for free in their next updates? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted April 19, 2017 Author Members Share Posted April 19, 2017 Well I can't speak for the industry, but let's just say if you're planning to buy Cakewalk's encoder before April 24th...don't! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil O'Keefe Posted April 19, 2017 Share Posted April 19, 2017 I'm sure that will make a lot of SONAR users happy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members stevewaits Posted April 21, 2017 Members Share Posted April 21, 2017 I'm sure that will make a lot of SONAR users happy. I guess not only them. And many more people will start to feel unhappy at the same time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted April 22, 2017 Author Members Share Posted April 22, 2017 First of all, stevewaits...welcome to the forum! I wonder if MP3 will become more ubiquitous because of this, or whether with increased streaming bandwidth and bigger hard drives, people are just going to move over to FLAC for being lossless. I know Apple has a lossless AAC compression algorithm too...I assume they ilcense it, but FLAC is open-source and royalty-free. Windows has already de facto ditched WMA in favor of making FLAC the audio of choice for Windows 10. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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