Re: Ogg Vorbis typos in http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG12/#smil2-audio (and elsewhere)

Hi Nathan,

Great to hear from Xiph!

On Wed, 07 May 2003, Nathan Sharfi wrote:

> Ogg Vorbis (nowhere do we refer to Vorbis-compressed audio in an Ogg
> container as "Ogg/Vorbis) files have the mimetype application/ogg, not
> audio/vorbis. If the file is known to have only Vorbis data in it, then
> the file can be served up with audio/x-vorbis.

Thanks for the correction. 

> As for patent encumbrance, Ogg Vorbis has gone through two patent
> searches--one in 2000 for CMGI (now dead or almost-dead dot-com), and
> another one by AOL to see if it was "safe" to include with Winamp. It is.

That's great news. To be clear, are you saying that AOL believes
that there are no patents held by any company infringed by Ogg 
Vorbis, ie. it would be safe for anyone to include Ogg Vorbis
(encoding + decoding) in any application? The reason I'm asking
is that AOL is a mega-huge company that probably has a large
number of cross-licensing arrangements with other mega-huge companies,
meaning that it may be OK for AOL to infringe with Ogg Vorbis, but
doesn't mean other organisations can.

Would AOL be willing to make the results of their patent
search public? Including any examinations of patents that
claim on technology used by Ogg Vorbis (I'm sure there
are plenty of these)?

This would really help us.

> Speex (http://www.speex.org/) and FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net/) are
> both believed to be patent-free, but they haven't had the patent-search
> verification that Vorbis has had. If the W3C or any of its member
> companies want to put up the money to hire counsel versed in these
> matters, feel free to contact us.

W3C definitely doesn't have the money to hire counsel for this. W3C
members may have an interest in doing this, but I'm not sure how to
ask them. And as far as my non-legal training goes, the result would
just be a list of potential patents that *may be* infringed, and possibly
a recommendation on how defensible each patent is. What you
need is the list of patents that *are* infringed and are defensible, but
that really takes a court to decide, not legal counsel.

Ah patents!! Fun fun fun :(

> P.S. I know that http://www.xiph.org/ looks like a pile of prestandard tag
> soup; we're trying to figure out if and how Zope could help in a
> redesign/rearchitecture binge.

:)

Dean

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2003 11:37:48 UTC