{"id":234,"date":"2007-03-05T06:31:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-05T13:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulgillin.com\/2007\/03\/mp3s-perilous-future.html"},"modified":"2007-03-05T06:31:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-05T13:31:00","slug":"mp3s-perilous-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/mp3s-perilous-future\/","title":{"rendered":"MP3&#039;s perilous future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/news\/culture\/music\/1,72785-0.html\">Wired News reports on a federal jury&#8217;s big legal judgment<\/a> against Microsoft over licenses to MP3 technology and questions whether MP3 has a future if the patent claims by Alcatel-Lucent are upheld.<\/p>\n<p>This rather important story has received only scant coverage in the media that I can see. If MP3 is abandoned by the software industry, it&#8217;ll inconvenience a lot of people, but probably leave us better off in the long term.<\/p>\n<p>MP3 is not a terribly high-quality format and it doesn&#8217;t support some features, such as bookmarks, that would make podcasting more useful. It has triumphed in the market for the same reason that VHS video did: it was in the right place at the right time. The best standard doesn&#8217;t always win, and that&#8217;s certainly the case here.<\/p>\n<p>If Alcatel-Lucent tries to wring every royalty it can out of this situation, it will score a short-term win but kill MP3 in the long term. The company will be better off accepting 10 cents on the dollar from a few big players and then putting MP3 under a creative commons-type license. It would get some good PR from such a move and could then position itself as a leader in developing digital audio formats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wired News reports on a federal jury&#8217;s big legal judgment against Microsoft over licenses to MP3 technology and questions whether MP3 has a future if the patent claims by Alcatel-Lucent are upheld. This rather important story has received only scant &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/mp3s-perilous-future\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-3M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}