Following the jury verdict awarding Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion from Microsoft for infringing on two patents that cover portions of the MP3 format used by its Windows Media Player a number of people have suggested that this will cause more companies to use the open source Ogg Vorbis codec as a royalty free replacement for the now further encumbered MP3 format. However as a story in Wired News notes while itsdevelopers claim that Ogg Vorbis is patent-free nobody really knows if this is true.
In this case Microsoft licensed patented MP3 technology from Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute but the jury decided that Microsoft infringed on other patents from Alcatel-Lucent. If the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute had open sourced their technology rather than charge for it, the verdict would have been the same. Developers and companies switching to Ogg Vorbis should keep this in mind.