Z:gnu-www-ja-why-audio-format-matters--621006-Up till now, the MP3 patent ow/en

Up till now, the MP3 patent owners have been clever enough not to harass individual users with demands for payment. They know that would stimulate popular awareness of (and eventually opposition to) the patents. Instead, they go after the makers of products that implement the MP3 format. The victims of these shakedowns shrug wearily and pay up, viewing it as just another cost of doing business, which is then passed on invisibly to users. However, not everyone is in a position to pay: some of your listeners use free software programs to play audio files. Because this software is freely copied and downloaded, there is no practical way for either the authors or the users to pay a patent fee &mdash; that is, to pay for the right to use the mathematical facts that underly the MP3 format. As a result, these programs cannot legally implement MP3, even though the tracks the users want to listen to may themselves be perfectly free! Because of this situation, some distributors of the GNU/Linux computer operating system &mdash; which has millions of users worldwide &mdash; have been unable to include MP3 players in their software distributions.