It’s been long forecast, and is on at last: Fraunhofer and Thomson Multimedia have new rates for the use of MP3. Non-commercial decoders were previously royalty-free; distributors of decoders now pay US75c per copy, while bands wanting to put up their own songs as MP3s are up for US$2000 a year.
The makers of the royalty-free Ogg Vorbis format have been polite enough to say thank you.
There have been no moves to charge the end users of MP3s … yet.
Bands wanting to put up their own songs as MP3s are charged nothing, actually, unless they make more than US$100,000 a year, according to the fine print at Thomson Multimedia’s site. And we all know how many bands make THAT much money.
“No license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.”
Me, I could care less; OggVorbis sounds way better anyway.
Yep, hence the ‘begins’.
As xiph.org put it in their letter: “Please be sure to threaten those who challenge your license fees with lawsuits and draconian collections efforts. We officially support any action you take to drive home the ‘mp3 costs money’ message. Thanks again, and best of luck!”
Of course, Ogg may be free, but it is unsupported by hardware players. Most hardware players are based on chips which do MPEG decoding in hardware, and unless sufficient money was spent on developing Ogg-on-a-chip, portable Ogg means carrying a laptop around. And it’s unlikely that there’ll be Ogg in hardware. The RIAA would sue anybody who promoted a new format which did not include DRM from the ground up. MP3 is only tolerated because it is “grandfathered” and there is no way of eliminating it (yet). If Rio or someone anwered the RIAA enough by marketing an Ogg-capable player, they could expect to feel the full wrath of the bottomless pockets of their legal departments.
The RIAA would sue anybody who promoted a new format which did not include DRM from the ground up.
The grounds usually cited for a mooted action along these lines is contributory copyright infringement. Which might be enough to scare off someone small, but as the legal case is actually extremely weak, anyone who was fabbing would probably be rich enough to fight it. They’d win in the end, after all.
with the implementation of corrupted cds by the majors, doesnt that effectively doom hardware mp3 players anyway, at least from an RIAA standpoint?