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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

The fuss over MP3 licensing shows up the real issues in the background debate over standards and patents which will continue to rumble and which is, in my opinion, the biggest issue facing the technology industry. As Vorbis point out, the issue is not that Thomson has changed their license terms to control or charge software MP3 CODECS. It is that they have not made such a change impossible. This is the debate commonly described as "RAND vs RF", where RAND stands for Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (the way that patent holders spin their desire to retain the right to apply whatever licensing terms they choose for their patents) and RF stands for Royalty Free (in my opinion a bad term for the waiving of control of a patent when it is used in a particular context). The worlds corporate patent holders will continue to claim that RAND licensing is fair and just, but the truth is that maintaining any control of a patent within the context of an open standard is a breach of trust and must be challenged.

posted at 2:07 PM (UK) | |