[Freeswitch-users] open g729

[Steve Underwood]

On 01/31/2011 04:32 AM, Steven Ayre wrote:
> Funny you mention it, but MP3 does have several patents covering 
> aspects of it that expire between 2007 (fine) and 2017 (not so fine). 
> There have been various companies at various times that have claimed 
> licenses are required to encode/decode it. Fraunhofer Institute being 
> a good example - they earned 100million euros in 2005 from mp3 
> licenses. In1998 they sent a lot of letters out to developers of 
> software using mp3 stating that they needed a licence.
>
> I guess the difference from G729 is that a) enough people in the 
> general public use it and want to continue using it and b) the patent 
> holders have declined to enforce license fees on free/foss software, 
> only focussing on commerical software, so there's plenty of stuff 
> around that can use it without worrying too much about the patents.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues
>
> -Steve
I think the main difference is the MP3 patent holders had to take a 
somewhat relaxed attitude to patent enforcement in the early day, to get 
MP3 usage to the point where people were fairly well locked in. Even 
then, Apple chose not to use MP3, so there was never the level of lock 
in they would have liked. This is lead to a somewhat relaxed attitude to 
patent enforcement for small offenders.

G.729 got a tight grip on IP phones from the very first IP phones. The 
market very quickly got to the point where the only codecs you could 
rely on two talk between two phones were G.711 and G.729. With that 
level of lock-in, the G.729 patent holders have had no reason to hold 
back, and lawyers letters go out to any minor offenders they can find.

Steve