Just when you thought RIM's fortunes couldn't get any worse, along comes Dolby Laboratories to knock the beleaguered company a little bit lower.
What is Dolby's deal? Patent infringement. It's seemingly the soup de jour of lawsuits these days, if lawsuits were soup and the legal system some kind of uber-litigious diner.
Anyway, quoth the audio-friendly company in an unfriendly statement about RIM:
"[RIM infringes upon patents covering] highly efficient digital audio compression technologies which allow manufacturers and consumers to provide and enjoy high quality audio while using extremely limited amounts of transmission and/or storage space for such audio."
The suit seeks to halt sales of the BlackBerry and the PlayBook. In the latter's case that may be a blessing in disguise.
There are opensource formats available that are better. OGG and FLAC.
People should really start using these more often so that they are not affected by these lawsuits and royalty payments making devices/software more expensive
from Vorbis website:
Epic Games (the makers of Unreal Tournament, et. al.) have used Vorbis in their games ever since releasing Unreal Tournament 2003 to compress game music without having per-game license fees sap profits from every game sold. Vorbis saves developers money by avoiding patent-license fees.
Epic isn't alone; other Vorbis users include:
Crystal Dynamics (Soul Reaver 2, Blood Omen 2)
Croteam (Serious Sam: The Second Encounter)
Pyrogon (Candy Cruncher)
PopCap Games (Alchemy)
EA Games (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)
It sucks that AC3 is popular but its not the end of the world at all.
Everyone should be using ogg and flac. Its better and free!
VLC is just an open source project that hasn't been sued YET. Doesn't mean that if you use VLC, Dolby isn't going to sue you.
+1. In the case of VLC, there really isn't anyone worth anything to sue so nobody has bothered. They certainly do violate plenty of patents - DVD playback for example - but there is no point in taking them to court.
The same goes for other formats such as OGG or FLAC. If somebody really big decided to use either one as a standard then the lawyers would come out of the woodwork, but as it is there isn't much point. What you would get out of EA for using it for a few of its games probably wouldn't even pay the lawyers...
It sucks that AC3 is popular but its not the end of the world at all.
Formats like AC3 and MP3 are very popular because there are many inexpensive hardware decoders available for them. OGG and FLAC have to be done in software, which can be too much for a CPU (and battery) in a mobile device.
