Or other free formats for that matter, Speex or FLAC
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 13:41:29 +0100, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Timwi wrote:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
The situation with MP3 is, as I understand it, much worse. Here the threat is to both encoders and decoders.
Audacity (free sound editor) has no complaints reading MP3s, but if you try to save as MP3, you get a message box telling you about licensing and patents and how you will have to install the LAME encoder.
I really don't think decoding MP3s is covered by patents.
Timwi
I think you'll find that Thomson think otherwise. See http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.pdf
Although they state: "More in general, no license fee is expected for desktop software decoders/players that are distributed free-of-charge for personal use." (Section 2.1.1, page 4), this does not appear to cover other possible Wikipedia uses such as access to Wikipedia over mobile devices running free software. Until there is a clear royalty-free patent licence grant for MP3 decoding by free software, I suggest we go with raw soundfiles or Ogg Vorbis.
-- Neil
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