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To: Savant who wrote (7834)	9/26/1999 10:30:00 PM
From: Savant	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18366

Reported that no suit found on Lexis. Possibility of existence in Germany. Thanks C. Best, Savant

To: Savant who wrote (7834)	9/27/1999 7:04:00 AM
From: MaryinRed	Respond to of 18366

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft iis.fhg.de iis.fhg.de iis.fhg.de with SDMI: intertrust.com

To: Savant who wrote (7834)	9/27/1999 9:11:00 AM
From: Tinroad	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18366

Savant, Apparently, Mary and I have been nosing around the same trail, including the MP3.com message boards. I also did a search of the entire web for keywords Fraunhofer, patent and infringement. Only came up with 6 or 7 hits, most from '98. I suspect that Fraunhofer & Thomson will probably let the open source code MP3 apps go unchallenged, and concentrate on protecting more advanced codecs like AAC and the other MPEG codecs (saw an MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 mentioned at the Fraunhofer site.) Only clarification I could find of the situation was an even earlier letter from the Fraunhofer Institute. TR ===================================================================== (from mpeg.org Mon, 19 Jan 1998 It has been clear that MPEG-LA is not dealing with audio issues. It seems this got around, but should be stated clearer. For typical application scenarios there are licensing models. We just do not post them to the world, but everybody who wants to get access to Layer-3 technology (software and/or patents) can write to us and get our "standard business answers" document with the address and phone number of the licensing manager at Thomson Multimedia (for consumer type applications). This works if people write to layer3@iis.fhg.de or use one of the mail buttons on our web-pages, too. If in some special cases there is the a question regarding licensing just parts of Layer-3 technology, not all of it, the rules are different. The patent statements in ISO are only regarding use of compliant decoders. Normally encoders are treated the same way, i.e. we do license all our patents on encoding to everybody who writes compliant encoders. This is the only way ISO has to somewhat enforce the use of standards: Whoever adheres to the standard, gets access to all the patents. Whoever does not use the standard, might be out of luck (depending on the patent holders), there is the possibility that he will not be able to get a license. If dist10.tar.gz is used to learn about writing encoders/decoders and the resulting encoder/decoder is compliant (delivers valid Layer-3 bitstreams and can decode valid Layer-3 bitstreams), then there is no charge for using the source code (it has been written to be useful for encoder/decoder writers) and the usual patent license issues apply: For the encoder get a license from Thomson (you can write to layer3@iis.fhg.de, we will give you further info), for the decoder this applies only if you make money from it (but see the caveat below). We (and Thomson) have (as far as we can determine, of course) unavoidable patent rights on Layer-3 encoding and decoding. We just are not enforcing the decoder rights on decoders which are software only and have been written by some freeware author (i.e. are freeware). Please understand that this sentence does not mean that I give an implied decoder license to everybody writing freeware code, I am not in the formal position to do this. You can consider this an authorative answer. Karlheinz Brandenburg FhG-IIS A, Audio/Multimedia Department Am Weichselgarten 3, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany