Alan Wolfe wrote:
Heya!
First off, IANAL but more/less a casual observer. I'd encourage you to secure professional legal advice to definitively answer your questions.
I was wondering; since mp3 is a closed format that you need to pay royalties for, how does libmad get around this?
It doesn't. Technically you are on the hook to reconcile your license liability with the holder of such in the geography your product will be marketed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues
That said enforcement has been selective and you conceivably could choose your own comfortability level relative to your situation.
Also I was looking at the libmad page and noticed it said this under licensing:
That is a separate license issue of Underbit's MAD decoder software. In a nutshell if you GPL your MAD enabled application (possibly exposing your own IP) you may distribute the aggregate under the GPL. Otherwise you'll need to contact the Underbit folks to negotiate an alternate license agreement.
I am looking for a way to convert mp3 to wav in a product that is going to be released commercially and libmad really seems like the perfect fit, I just want to make sure I know what's up with licensing before commiting to this path.
If you are not bound to mp3 as a compression format, others such as Ogg/Vorbis (well Tremor) may interest being a license-free public domain format and offering compression/ quality benefits beyond that available from mp3.
-john