Is the MP3 File Format Doomed, or Becomes a Second GIF?

Who does not know and use music files in MP3 format today? Latest since the huge success of Apple’s IPod and iTunes Website that made access and use of the music by your favorite artist child’s play did MP3 a house hold name. MP3 is also the de facto standard for Podcasts today.

This is already an “old” story from one month ago and was on my list of things to blog about. I got caught up with other things and put it aside. I was surprised that this was not picked up by the Blogosphere really and that nobody took notice.

The L.A. Times reported back on February 24 and the New York Times on February 23, about the $1.52-billion ruling against Microsoft by a jury in the patent violation lawsuit against the company by Lucent (later bought by Alcatel).

$1.52-billion is almost the amount Google paid for YouTube, just to put things into perspective. What patent violation is worth so much money? Why could Microsoft “miss” that and not pay royalties from the beginning?

Well Microsoft did pay royalties actually, like other companies that use the MP3 format in their products, including Apple Computers for their IPods. They paid the royalties to the Fraunhofer Institute and Thomson and Bell Labs, two patent holders to the technology behind MP3.

After the success of MP3 worldwide did suddenly Lucent claim a patent on the MP3 format as well stating that some of the technology that is used for MP3 was developed by Bell Labs together with Lucent earlier before Bell Labs together with some others developed and finalized the MP3 format together with the Frauenhofer Institute in Germany.

Alcatel-Lucent’s claim was acknowledged and now is the company on a “suing spree” starting with the big fish Microsoft with some double digit billions cash in the bank. Who is next, Apple? Well, it’s another big fish to get a large chunk of money from.

What is going to happen? Anybody remembers the lawsuit of Unisys Corportion against the ISP Compuserve because of its use of the GIF image format? Here is a little refresher to the old controversy.

The result of this was the development of the true public domain alternative format PNG.

Will there be a similar development as a result of this and probably following lawsuits around the MP3 format?

I am personally opposed to software patents in general. I never really liked it, but there are plenty of resources and examples out on the internet that changed the “not liking” to an “opposed to”.

Have a look at this dark prediction of what will eventually happen if software patent law continues the way it is today.

The above image that shows what it takes to violate a software patent came from this website with interesting information and resources to the subject.

O’Reilly published an interesting list with controversial patents you should have a look at.

Not only software patents are absurd, also some real world patents make you shake your head and ask how anybody could approve such application and claim a patent on this. Here is a list of “crazy patents” at FreePatentsOnline.com. A good laugh that will stop if you would be sued over this by the patent holder.

I am not a evangelist of open software, but the whole concept of it sounds with every news that comes out because of software patent violations a bit better to me. I looked at open source as a funny experiment by geeks.

I also wrote code years back which I gave away with the program and the note that anybody is free to use and change it, before there was something like the open source movement, but hey, that was stuff I did as a hobby.
Business software was a complete different story for me. I admit that I was wrong and I adjusted my attitude towards open source over the years. They might be right and onto something,