Over the past few years, the cry of "I Want My MP3!" has revolutionized Internet music marketing and spawned countless copyright suits based on MP3-distributed music. Just as it looks like the suits are over, it may be the folks who bred the format are about to put the squeeze on users and, in effect, kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Beware the Suits
This time it's not lawsuits, it's the suits at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute that are the problem. Programmers have used it freely for years, but MP3 is in fact the intellectual property of the Fraunhofer Institute and the MPEG Consortium. In September 1998 Fraunhofer sent letters to software developers saying it planned to start charging licensing fees. Fraunhofer (and other MPEG Consortium members) claim that it is impossible to create an MP3 encoder without infringing on their patents. To create/use an encoder, the law says one must pay royalties to Fraunhofer and other MPEG Consortium members. In other words, you can play what you like, but you're not allowed to contribute without paying the ante. MPEG-4, destined to be the next generation of internet audio, is even more tightly controlled. More worrisome perhaps is the prospect of behind the scenes alliances between MPEG (which dominates the audio technology) with the RIAA/music industry which seeks to control all distribution.

Whenever increasing numbers of participants take an increasingly larger piece of the pie, the market goes out and finds a new pie. So, for the last year or so, the race has been on to find a new solution to compete with the current, and ever more costly and restrictive, technology.

They say there is no problem a good solution cannot cure, and in this case the hot contender is:

Ogg Vorbis.
Ogg Vorbis? Yep. Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free general purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC.