PATENTS ON MP3 format due to EXPIRE

MP3 took off in the late 90s as the digital music format. It then proceeded to slaughter the CD, and launch the file sharing revolution as well. It’s a pleased format that has roots stretching all the way back to the early 1980s, when the possibility of sending music over ISDN lines was first considered. now the patents on it are beginning to expire and its licencing program has been terminated.

The MP3 conventional was the home of Fraunhofer IIS, and the original licencing model was intended such that encoders would be expensive, and decoders relatively inexpensive. This would allow people to get software to listen to MP3s cheaply, but the creation of MP3s would be expensive, and thus handled by studios and music labels. This all changed when a premium MP3 encoder was leaked to the public, and unexpectedly it became possible to readily convert your CDs at home into the MP3 format.

One hangover of this ownership of the MP3 conventional was that when you installed certain FOSS software, such as Audacity or a Linux distro, you would find that you had to go and do some legwork to find an MP3 codec. That was because it wasn’t worth the legal trouble for the FOSS authors to set up a workaround, and trading in proprietary software is the antithesis to everything they stand for.

However, now that a lot more of the relevant patents are expiring, you can now expect MP3 support to be baked into a lot more software. It may be a lot more than a little late, with a lot more advanced audio formats beginning to take over, but it’s terrific to know that Fedora, for one, is starting to include MP3 support with their releases.

If you’d like to read a lot more about the history of the MP3, check out this terrific post from NPR. Fraunhofer have their own terrific history site, too. If all this talk of advanced audio formats has gotten you excited, check out this MP3 decoder written for the ESP8266.

[Thanks to Tim Trzepacz for the tip!]