1 December 2006
MP3 and wi-fi: Different strokes
Charles Goldfinger
Fraunhoffer,
which is partly state-funded, invented, published and patented MP3 in the
early 1990s. To market it worldwide, it allied itself with Thomson Electronics, a commercial electronics firm, which adopted a non-discriminatory licensing
policy, which by normal standards was quite successful.
What neither
Fraunhoffer nor Thomson Electronics foresaw that MP3 would become the dominant
standard for online music and the latter would become a grass-root movement,
operating outside the established legal framework. Thus, most of music
downloaded on the Internet was in the MP3 format but was done on a...
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