Patent annoyances
Reading over at BoS I saw something rather near and dear to my heart, discussion on the mp3 patents, as I had been looking into writing a player app of some sort (the player was secondary to some UI concerns I was considering, but it was music related) but had put it off. However now I don’t think it’s worth the bother, considering some time this year the mp3 licensing changed to be a MINIMUM of $15,000 for licensing, more if you sold enough copies.
I can understand wanting to make money off of your patents, but 15 THOUSAND, minimum? Really? And I thought I wished Ogg Vorbis was more popular before finding this out. Hell the mp3 player I finally bought for listening to podcasts while going about my day (SanDisk Sansa Fuse 4 Gig) doesn’t even support Ogg, but it had everything else I wanted, and none of the podcasts I listen to are in Ogg so that was, unfortunately , negotiable. Seeing this, though, I regret that decision a bit more.
Now I think I need to do some research on how much longer before the various mp3 patents start to die, as the impression I have is it shouldn’t be TOO terribly long.
