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why-audio-format-matters.html (9310B)

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 <title>Why Audio Format Matters
 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 <h2>Why Audio Format Matters</h2>
 
 <h3>An invitation to audio producers to use Ogg
 Vorbis alongside MP3</h3>
 
 <address class="byline">by Karl Fogel</address>
 
 <div class="infobox">
 <p>The patents covering MP3 will reportedly all have expired by 2018,
 but similar problems will continue to arise as long as patents are
 permitted to restrict software development.</p>
 </div>
 <hr class="thin" />
  
 <p>If you produce audio for general distribution, you probably spend
 99.9% of your time thinking about form, content, and production
 quality, and 0.1% thinking about what audio format to distribute your
 recordings in.</p>
 
 <p>And in an ideal world, this would be fine.  Audio formats would be
 like the conventions of laying out a book, or like pitches
 and other building-blocks of music: containers of meaning, available
 for anyone to use, free of restrictions.  You wouldn't have to worry
 about the consequences of distributing your material in MP3 format,
 any more than you would worry about putting a page number at the top
 of a page, or starting a book with a table of contents.</p>
 
 <p>Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.  MP3 is a patented
 format.  What this means is that various companies have
 government-granted monopolies over certain aspects of the MP3
 standard, such that whenever someone creates or listens to an MP3
 file, <em>even with software not written by one of those
 companies</em>, the companies have the right to decide whether or not
 to permit that use of MP3.  Typically what they do is demand money, of
 course.  But the terms are entirely up to them: they can forbid you
 from using MP3 at all, if they want.  If you've been using MP3 files
 and didn't know about this situation, then either a) someone else,
 usually a software maker, has been paying the royalties for you, or b)
 you've been unknowingly infringing on patents, and in theory could be
 sued for it.</p>
 
 <p>The harm here goes deeper than just the danger to you.  A software
 patent grants one party the exclusive right to use a certain
 mathematical fact.  This right can then be bought and sold, even
 litigated over like a piece of property, and you can never predict
 what a new owner might do with it.  This is not just an abstract
 possibility: MP3 patents have been the subject of multiple lawsuits,
 with damages totalling more than a billion dollars.</p>
 
 <p>The most important issue here is not about the fees, it's about the
 freedom to communicate and to develop communications tools.
 Distribution formats such as MP3 are the containers of information
 exchange on the Internet.  Imagine for a moment that someone had a
 patent on the modulated vibration of air molecules: you would need a
 license just to hold a conversation or play guitar for an audience.
 Fortunately, our government has long held that old, familiar methods
 of communication, like vibrating air molecules or writing symbols on
 pieces of paper, are not patentable: no one can own them, they are
 free for everyone to use.  But until those same liberties are extended
 to newer, less familiar methods (like particular standards for
 representing sounds via digital encoding), we who generate audio
 works must take care what format we use&mdash;and
 require our listeners to use.</p>
 
 <h4 class="sec">A way out: Ogg Vorbis format</h4>
 
 <p>Ogg Vorbis is an alternative to MP3.  It gets high sound quality,
 can compress down to a smaller size than MP3 while still sounding good
 (thus saving you time and bandwidth costs), and best of all, is
 designed to be completely free of patents.</p>
 
 <p>You won't sacrifice any technical quality by encoding your audio in
 Ogg Vorbis.  The files sound fine, and most players know how to play
 them.  But you will increase the total number of people who can listen
 to your tracks, and at the same time help the push for patent-free
 standards in distribution formats.</p>
 
 <div class="announcement comment" role="complementary">
 <p>More information <a href="https://xiph.org/about/">about Xiph.org</a> (the
 organization that created Ogg Vorbis) and the importance of free
 distribution formats.</p>
 
 <p>The Free Software Foundation has produced a user-friendly <a
 href="https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/playogg/how">guide to installing Ogg
 Vorbis support in Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X</a>.</p>
 </div>
 
 <p>The <a href="https://xiph.org/vorbis/">Ogg Vorbis home page</a>
 has all the information you need to both listen
 to and produce Vorbis-encoded files.  The safest thing, for you and
 your listeners, would be to offer Ogg Vorbis files exclusively.  But
 since there are still some players that can only handle MP3, and you
 don't want to lose audience, a first step is to offer both Ogg Vorbis
 and MP3, while explaining to your downloaders (perhaps by linking to
 this article) exactly why you support Ogg Vorbis.</p>
 
 <p>And with Ogg Vorbis, you'll even <em>gain</em> some audience.
 Here's how:</p>
 
 <p>Up till now, the MP3 patent owners have been clever enough not to
 harass individual users with demands for payment.  They know that
 would stimulate popular awareness of (and eventually opposition to)
 the patents.  Instead, they go after the makers of products that
 implement the MP3 format.  The victims of these shakedowns shrug
 wearily and pay up, viewing it as just another cost of doing business,
 which is then passed on invisibly to users.  However, not everyone is
 in a position to pay: some of your listeners use free software
 programs to play audio files.  Because this software is freely copied
 and downloaded, there is no practical way for either the authors or
 the users to pay a patent fee&mdash;that is, to pay for
 the right to use the mathematical facts that underly the MP3 format.
 As a result, these programs cannot legally implement MP3, even though
 the tracks the users want to listen to may themselves be perfectly
 free!  Because of this situation, some distributors of the GNU/Linux
 computer operating system&mdash;which has millions of
 users worldwide&mdash;have been unable to include MP3
 players in their software distributions.</p>
 
 <p>Luckily, you don't have to require such users to engage in civil
 disobedience every time they want to listen to your works.  By
 offering Ogg Vorbis, you ensure that no listeners have to get involved
 with a patented distribution format unless they choose to, and that
 your audio works will never be hampered by unforseen licensing
 requirements.  Eventually, the growing acceptance of Ogg Vorbis as a
 standard, coupled with increasingly unpredictable behavior by some of
 the MP3 patent holders, may make it impractical to offer MP3 files at
 all.  But even before that day comes, Ogg Vorbis remains the only
 portable, royalty-free audio format on the Internet, and it's worth a
 little extra effort to support.</p>
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 <p>Please send general FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to
 <a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org">&lt;gnu@gnu.org&gt;</a>.
 There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
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 <p>Copyright &copy; 2007 Karl Fogel</p>
 
 <p>Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are
 permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this
 notice, and the copyright notice, are preserved.</p>
 
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 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
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 $Date: 2021/09/22 08:18:39 $
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