Mp3, patents, and Ogg/Vorbis

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

Has there been any move towards Ogg/Vorbis encoding on account of the
recent patent judgment that MS needs a license from Alcatel to package
mp3 encoders/decoders with its systems?  How sure is Xiph (and whoever)
that Ogg/Vorbis encoding is really not covered by any patents?

jon

[Luis Villa-3]

On 2/28/07, Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh@...> wrote:
> Has there been any move towards Ogg/Vorbis encoding on account of the
> recent patent judgment that MS needs a license from Alcatel to package
> mp3 encoders/decoders with its systems?

Everyone who has anything to sue in our space was already pushing ogg
(primarily RH and Novell.) Ubuntu seems to think that being based in
the Isle of Man covers their asses (unlike RH and Novell, they ship
mp3 from ubuntu-owned servers.) Real and Fluendo ship mp3, but
presumably both pay licensing fees, and Real presumably has a patent
thicket of their own.

> How sure is Xiph (and whoever)
> that Ogg/Vorbis encoding is really not covered by any patents?

They claim very sure, but AFAICS no one really knows/could really know
until it went to court. RH and Novell's lawyers seem satisfied;
Nokia's are apparently not.

Luis

[Don Marti]

begin Luis Villa quotation of Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 07:25:54AM -0500:

> Everyone who has anything to sue in our space was already pushing ogg
> (primarily RH and Novell.) Ubuntu seems to think that being based in
> the Isle of Man covers their asses (unlike RH and Novell, they ship
> mp3 from ubuntu-owned servers.) Real and Fluendo ship mp3, but
> presumably both pay licensing fees, and Real presumably has a patent
> thicket of their own.

You can also get a licensed mp3 decoder through
Linspire -- currently for their distribution only,
but they have announced that they'll start offering
their "Click-n-Run Warehouse" service for other
distributions.

My question is: does anyone know of a licensed
_en_coder for Linux that's available in quantity one?
(I know that embedded vendors can get them but the
minimum license fee is pretty high.)

--
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti@...

[Luis Villa-3]

On 2/28/07, Don Marti <dmarti@...> wrote:

> begin Luis Villa quotation of Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 07:25:54AM -0500:
>
> > Everyone who has anything to sue in our space was already pushing ogg
> > (primarily RH and Novell.) Ubuntu seems to think that being based in
> > the Isle of Man covers their asses (unlike RH and Novell, they ship
> > mp3 from ubuntu-owned servers.) Real and Fluendo ship mp3, but
> > presumably both pay licensing fees, and Real presumably has a patent
> > thicket of their own.
>
> You can also get a licensed mp3 decoder through
> Linspire -- currently for their distribution only,
> but they have announced that they'll start offering
> their "Click-n-Run Warehouse" service for other
> distributions.

From what I understand of DVD licensing* they are practically begging
to get sued on DVD issues, so I'm not sure one should take their
position on mp3s to be a strong indication one way or the other of the
relative legal liability of mp3s/oggs, or even their own legal
position wrt mp3s. But yes, they do offer you the option of paying for
an mp3 decoder. :)

(And no idea on the encoder front. Any particular reason you need (a
legal) one that vorbis won't suffice?)

Luis

* the DVD-CCA agreement apparently requires Macrovision as part of any
DVD player implementation, and no one has implemented Macrovision on
Linux. So they may not have gotten sued yet, but that doesn't mean
they've actually got a DVD-CCA agreement.

[Don Marti]

begin Luis Villa quotation of Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 05:56:20PM -0500:
> From what I understand of DVD licensing* they are practically begging
> to get sued on DVD issues, so I'm not sure one should take their
> position on mp3s to be a strong indication one way or the other of the
> relative legal liability of mp3s/oggs, or even their own legal
> position wrt mp3s. But yes, they do offer you the option of paying for
> an mp3 decoder. :)
>
> (And no idea on the encoder front. Any particular reason you need (a
> legal) one that vorbis won't suffice?)

Lots of cheap portable devices support MP3 but not
Ogg Vorbis.  And I don't know of any CD player that
supports Ogg Vorbis on a CD, but there are quite a
few MP3 CD players on the market now.

> * the DVD-CCA agreement apparently requires Macrovision as part of any
> DVD player implementation, and no one has implemented Macrovision on
> Linux. So they may not have gotten sued yet, but that doesn't mean
> they've actually got a DVD-CCA agreement.

IBM did once do Macrovision on Linux, as a kernel
module.  (I'm sure Tivo and other embedded vendors
have implementations, too, but that doesn't really
count.)  Don't have the original of this but here's
a forward:
  http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2001-April/002236.html

--
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti@...

[Luis Villa-3]

On 2/28/07, Don Marti <dmarti@...> wrote:

> begin Luis Villa quotation of Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 05:56:20PM -0500:
> > From what I understand of DVD licensing* they are practically begging
> > to get sued on DVD issues, so I'm not sure one should take their
> > position on mp3s to be a strong indication one way or the other of the
> > relative legal liability of mp3s/oggs, or even their own legal
> > position wrt mp3s. But yes, they do offer you the option of paying for
> > an mp3 decoder. :)
> >
> > (And no idea on the encoder front. Any particular reason you need (a
> > legal) one that vorbis won't suffice?)
>
> Lots of cheap portable devices support MP3 but not
> Ogg Vorbis.  And I don't know of any CD player that
> supports Ogg Vorbis on a CD, but there are quite a
> few MP3 CD players on the market now.

Obviously :) I meant more personal use on those devices? commercial use? etc.

> > * the DVD-CCA agreement apparently requires Macrovision as part of any
> > DVD player implementation, and no one has implemented Macrovision on
> > Linux. So they may not have gotten sued yet, but that doesn't mean
> > they've actually got a DVD-CCA agreement.
>
> IBM did once do Macrovision on Linux, as a kernel
> module.  (I'm sure Tivo and other embedded vendors
> have implementations, too, but that doesn't really
> count.)  Don't have the original of this but here's
> a forward:
>   http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2001-April/002236.html

Huh, interesting. I stand corrected.

Luis

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 20:56 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 2/28/07, Don Marti <dmarti@...> wrote:
> > Lots of cheap portable devices support MP3 but not
> > Ogg Vorbis.  And I don't know of any CD player that
> > supports Ogg Vorbis on a CD, but there are quite a
> > few MP3 CD players on the market now.

Precisely what I was getting at.  Do any of the makers of these kinds of
devices have any plans to switch to Ogg/Vorbis?  

Obviously it won't happen soon, since their potential customers have
billions of songs encoded as mp3s, mostly on devices that won't emit
them in digital format -- and even if they would, there would be quality
loss from re-encoding.  Most likely all these companies are waiting to
see what happens with the patent case.

However ... if the suit continues to favor Alcatel, and Alcatel ends up
owning the mp3 standard and trying to get a lot of revenue from it,
there may be a move toward Ogg/Vorbis.  Things may get interesting.

jon

[Lawrence Rosen]

Hi Don,

> > * the DVD-CCA agreement apparently requires Macrovision as part of any
> > DVD player implementation, and no one has implemented Macrovision on
> > Linux. So they may not have gotten sued yet, but that doesn't mean
> > they've actually got a DVD-CCA agreement.
>
> IBM did once do Macrovision on Linux, as a kernel
> module.  (I'm sure Tivo and other embedded vendors
> have implementations, too, but that doesn't really
> count.)  Don't have the original of this but here's
> a forward:
>   http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2001-April/002236.html

This is fascinating. Thanks for rescuing and sharing this email.

I'm confused about the intellectual property at issue here that presumably
prevents Linux from running MP3 drivers. The email refers to "legal" risk as
if that is one subject. MP3 is a patented technology. Is there a fear that
Linux drivers can't implement MP3 because they don't have a patent license?
Or is this a copyright-related fear, that it might be a DMCA violation to
decode MP3 data streams within a computer running Linux?

Keith Frechette wrote that, "[for] example, enabling the user to transfer
DVD movies to other media (video tape, for example) via the S-Video port
would likely have triggered a flood of lawsuits." Certainly that would be a
risk if the enabling of copyright infringement were the motive or primary
use of that technology. But primarily enabling a user to replace the
operating system on her MP3-enabled (and patent-licensed) computer so that
she may play her own (legal) DVDs is almost certainly not an infringing act.
Nor is it an infringing act to ship a product that the consumer herself
later "hacks" in order to infringe; connecting your radio to loudspeakers at
the shopping mall is an infringing act, but not for the manufacturer of the
radio or the loudspeakers!

What intellectual property is preventing Linux-based computers from loading
MP3 drivers and playing MP3 DVDs? Remember the exhaustion doctrine: If I buy
a Dell computer with Windows and later replace the operating system with
Linux, what other licenses do I need in order to play my own MP3 DVDs? In
fact, what specific MP3 licenses do I need in order to load Linux on a Dell
computer to start with, given that I'm buying legal DVDs? Is there anything
that prevents Dell from obtaining MP3 patent licenses on behalf of its
customers for its computers regardless of which operating system runs on
them?

Keith wrote this: "Under Linux, however, video drivers (X servers) are
generally open-sourced, so handling Macrovision control logic in the video
driver is not appropriate. Instead, the code is placed in a separate,
binary-only, kernel driver." What is it about MP3 technology that is
incompatible with Linux or the GPL?

/Larry

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don Marti [mailto:dmarti@...]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 5:41 PM
> To: fsb@...
> Subject: Re: Mp3, patents, and Ogg/Vorbis
>
> begin Luis Villa quotation of Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 05:56:20PM -0500:
> > From what I understand of DVD licensing* they are practically begging
> > to get sued on DVD issues, so I'm not sure one should take their
> > position on mp3s to be a strong indication one way or the other of the
> > relative legal liability of mp3s/oggs, or even their own legal
> > position wrt mp3s. But yes, they do offer you the option of paying for
> > an mp3 decoder. :)
> >
> > (And no idea on the encoder front. Any particular reason you need (a
> > legal) one that vorbis won't suffice?)
>
> Lots of cheap portable devices support MP3 but not
> Ogg Vorbis.  And I don't know of any CD player that
> supports Ogg Vorbis on a CD, but there are quite a
> few MP3 CD players on the market now.
>
> > * the DVD-CCA agreement apparently requires Macrovision as part of any
> > DVD player implementation, and no one has implemented Macrovision on
> > Linux. So they may not have gotten sued yet, but that doesn't mean
> > they've actually got a DVD-CCA agreement.
>
> IBM did once do Macrovision on Linux, as a kernel
> module.  (I'm sure Tivo and other embedded vendors
> have implementations, too, but that doesn't really
> count.)  Don't have the original of this but here's
> a forward:
>   http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2001-April/002236.html
>
> --
> Don Marti
> http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
> dmarti@...

[Don Marti]

begin Lawrence Rosen quotation of Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 07:19:30PM -0800:

> I'm confused about the intellectual property at issue here that presumably
> prevents Linux from running MP3 drivers. The email refers to "legal" risk as
> if that is one subject. MP3 is a patented technology. Is there a fear that
> Linux drivers can't implement MP3 because they don't have a patent license?
> Or is this a copyright-related fear, that it might be a DMCA violation to
> decode MP3 data streams within a computer running Linux?

This isn't a patent issue, but a DVD CCA license
issue.  AFAIK the actual data on a DVD is MPEG, so
it's decodeable with an MPEG-licensed decoder which
you can get for Linux.  But the anti-user encryption,
called CSS, is (was?) a trade secret of DVD CCA.

> Keith Frechette wrote that, "[for] example, enabling the user to transfer
> DVD movies to other media (video tape, for example) via the S-Video port
> would likely have triggered a flood of lawsuits." Certainly that would be a
> risk if the enabling of copyright infringement were the motive or primary
> use of that technology.

The DMCA talks about "access control" as well as
copy control -- so a circumvention technology that
allows a user to do some action other than copying
(such as skipping the "unskippable" commercials on
some DVDs) could be just as much a DMCA violation as
a copying program.

> Nor is it an infringing act to ship a product that the consumer herself
> later "hacks" in order to infringe; connecting your radio to loudspeakers at
> the shopping mall is an infringing act, but not for the manufacturer of the
> radio or the loudspeakers!

Yes, but if it's, say, an XM radio, and the XM license
requires the radio's features that limit the user's
actions to be "robust" then the radio manufacturer can
violate its contractual oblications to XM if the user
succeeds in making the connection.

> What intellectual property is preventing Linux-based computers from loading
> MP3 drivers and playing MP3 DVDs?

The MPEG patent pool and the DVD CCA trade secrets
on CSS.

> Remember the exhaustion doctrine: If I buy
> a Dell computer with Windows and later replace the operating system with
> Linux, what other licenses do I need in order to play my own MP3 DVDs?

The Windows license probably requires you not
to split out the MP3 decoder from the rest of the
Windows product.  But if you buy the computer and boot
Linux without ever accepting the Windows license,
can you hack out the instructions implementing MP3
from the rest of Windows Media Player and use them?
I don't see why not.

> In
> fact, what specific MP3 licenses do I need in order to load Linux on a Dell
> computer to start with, given that I'm buying legal DVDs?

I think that the patent holders want a royalty from
those who sell MPEG content and from the manufacturers
of playback devices.

> Is there anything
> that prevents Dell from obtaining MP3 patent licenses on behalf of its
> customers for its computers regardless of which operating system runs on
> them?

Yes -- the fact that they're already getting an MP3
license with each copy of Windows, and if they paid
for another one tied to the hardware they'd be driving
up the cost of their product to the Windows customers.

> Keith wrote this: "Under Linux, however, video drivers (X servers) are
> generally open-sourced, so handling Macrovision control logic in the video
> driver is not appropriate. Instead, the code is placed in a separate,
> binary-only, kernel driver." What is it about MP3 technology that is
> incompatible with Linux or the GPL?

Keith isn't facing an MP3 issue here, but a DVD CCA
contract requirement.

--
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti@...