On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 09:40:27AM +0100, Pavel Bradut Boghita wrote: > I am following this thread with interest, because this whole issue of > pattenting the wheel and then charging everyone who uses it is really quite > perverse. > I am a complete outsider as far as this kind of programming is concerned, but > I would like to get something a bit more clearer in my head. My parents have > been involved with patents at one stage or another in their lifes. And from > what I've seen they really had to work hard to prove that whatever they were > pattenting was original and not done before (this was/is happening in > Romania). > How then, can someone patent code which has been around and used for quite a > while I just don't get it. AFAIK it's not the code that is patented (Fraunhofer has licensed code that one can use if one pays for it, but that is not the problem here, since there is GPL encoders/decoders available) , but the MP3 audio compression concept, i.e. that particular technique (a high level algorithm, if I understand these things correct) to transform and compress raw audio samples to mp3-files. -- Note that I use Debian version 3.0 Linux emac140 2.4.17 #1 sön feb 10 20:21:22 CET 2002 i686 unknown Hans Ekbrand
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