We in North America have been paying the Dolby AC-3 tax for the last 20 years. Dolby successfully weaseled AC-3 as the multi-channel audio encoding standard for MPEG-2 DVDs. This is despite the fact that MPEG-2 already has a multi-channel audio encoding (AAC). DVDs in Europe utilize AAC audio.<p>Thus every DVD and DVD player sold in N. America has to license AC-3 from Dolby.<p>The best way to steal from people is to do it without their knowledge.
20 years just seems way too long for a patent, especially as fast that the tech industry moves nowadays. Even 3 or 5 years would be better if we're going to keep having government granted monopolies.
The MPEG-2 patents also ran out recently. Even MPEG-4, as used online, may be out of patent. The newer patents in the MPEG-LA portfolio for MPEG-4 are mostly for things nobody uses online, such as interlace and 5-channel audio. It's about time for someone to take a hard look at the remaining MPEG-LA patents.
> "You have probably paid many AC-3 license fees over the years. AC-3 license fees are part of the cost of TVs, game consoles, and other AV equipment sold in the last 25 years."<p>I'm curious ... what's the ballpark end-user license cost the public has been paying for the ability to decode AC-3 on their TVs and receivers and consoles and other devices?
When Japan opened up to the West, Korekiyo Takahashi visited the US in 1886. "We said, 'What is it that makes the United States such a great nation?' And we investigated and we found that it was patents, and we will have patents."<p><a href="http://www.iphalloffame.com/korekiyo_takahashi/" rel="nofollow">http://www.iphalloffame.com/korekiyo_takahashi/</a><p>You need to reward innovators or you won't have innovation.
What's the practical upshot of this? Are there some apps that are waiting for this bit to expire so they can finally make things work the way they should?<p>For example, Audacity for Windows doesn't install with MP3 support. You have to download a plugin from Germany before Audacity will read/write MP3. Which I presume is because patents.
This makes, possibly, one of the most Widely used and Hardware compatible codec patent free.
( All MP3's patent will expire in Dec 2017 )<p>And AC-3 offer lossless mode, which means you now have a Free, Lossloess codec that can be played on a very wide range of media player.<p>My previous experience ( that was properly more then 10 years ago already )was that AC-3 sounded a lot better then Mp3 at high bitrate / 256Kbps.<p>Not sure how it fares with AAC.
Is there a similar status page somewhere for DTS/DCA? I think that's the last of the first generation multichannel audio codecs which is still both widely used and patent encumbered.
I happened to open this link with about 5 minutes left on the countdown, so I totally watched it tick down all the way to 0. Unfortunately no fireworks at the end, just the clock starting to show the time the patents had now been expired :)
I have an AVCHD camcorder that is excellent in all respects, except for the fact that it uses AC-3 at something like 256 kbps for its stereo sound: compression artifacts are quite noticeable.
I think the last MP3 patent will expire by the end of the year, I always thought AC-3 is younger than MP3 but well. (Almost the same age) MP3 is also an example of prolonged patent validity, it was approved in 1991, published in 1993 but the last patent expires in 2017.