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Topic: MP3 license is expired? (Read 10471 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: MP3 license is expired?

Reply #1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source

It's better to check an official information https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html

Patent 5703999 has expired already.  The real date of expiration is November 18, 2016 (not December 2017).
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-November/216662.html

Re: MP3 license is expired?

Reply #2
It should be noted, that patents expire depending on date of grant and also place of grant.

If I remember correctly, the last patent to expire was some time earlier this year in Japan, two weeks after the expired everywhere else.

Re: MP3 license is expired?

Reply #3
lame, libmad, and mpg123 are now in EPEL for RHEL/CentOS and they wouldn't be if the Red Hat lawyers had not approved them, which they would not have if they were still valid.

Okay that's not a legal argument but it is pretty convincing to me the patents have all expired.

Re: MP3 license is expired?

Reply #4
lame, libmad, and mpg123 are now in EPEL for RHEL/CentOS and they wouldn't be if the Red Hat lawyers had not approved them, which they would not have if they were still valid.

Okay that's not a legal argument but it is pretty convincing to me the patents have all expired.

Well, you're quite right, though. Fedora is quite well known to be really stingy about these things.
However they mainly cared about the patents in the US. Fedora accepted LAME and other libs for MP3 the moment the last patent expired in the US, some time before they expired in Japan. Since the Fedora foundation and Red Hat are based in US, it makes sense for them to use that basis for which legal boundaries to follow, etc.

Here's a Hackaday article about this: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/14/patents-on-mp3-format-due-to-expire/

They also mention Fedora.

Also this: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,113938.0.html <--- IgorC's thread about the expiry dates of MP3 patents.