On the heels of Microsoft’s big MP3 patent lawsuit loss, The New York Times’ Douglas Heingartner has this piece today that tries to puzzle through who owns MP3 technology. The answer isn’t easy because MP3 has many “fathers,” including Thomson, Royal Philips Electronics, AT&T, via Bell Labs, now part of Alcatel-Lucent, Germany’s the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Sisvel, an Italian company whose American subsidiary is called Audio MPEG, and possibly a small Texas company called Texas MP3 Technologies.
Is it any surprise that Leonardo Chiariglione, Chairman of the MPEG Group, “thinks the patent situation in general not positive for the wide adoption of the standard?” Perhaps if a Patent and Trademark Office pilot project, designed to solicit via the web more feedback on patent application approvals, had been in place sooner, the situation with MP3 patents would be a whole lot more clear.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:23 AM|Comments(1)
Ogg / Vorbis is the answer. Open source. They are a long way from widespread adoption, of course, ... but so was Linux itself back in the mid-1990s.
Posted by: SteveM at March 5, 2007 3:37 PM
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