The Largest Patent Settlement in History (pending appeal).
Assuming the decision is upheld against Microsoft’s appeal, how will this affect the MP3 player market?
Given that the patents are apparently almost two decades old, they will be expired in a couple of years. But will the player manufacturers elect to pay royalties during that interim or get out until it’s free?
Interesting. I wonder if this will really push the acceptance of a new codec.
MP3 is quite old and not especially good at what it does, it just has tons of momentum.
I think Apple’s AAC will get a big boost, considering the popularity of iPods and how easily convert mp3s to aac in iTunes.
…how easily you can convert…
AAC is an international standard developed by MPEG working with various companies (hopefully none of which will sue).
The DRM-wrapped songs that Apple sells on the iTunes Store are in AAC. The DRM (Fairplay) is proprietary to Apple, though.
AAC is a pretty decent candidate for replacing MP3. Ogg Vorbis is another option, for an open-source candidate which may make it harder to be sued.