The basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is patent-free in the European Union, all patents having expired there by 2012 at the latest. In the United States, the technology became substantially patent-free on 16 April 2017 (see below).

Mar 23, 2011 · Google "history of the MP3" today, and you'll find two options, neither satisfying: brief timelines that privilege the user experience over the process of invention and relentlessly …

Feb 26, 2007 · These are the patents that everyone who makes an MP3-related product has licensed. We’ll get to those. First though, here are the Alcatel-Lucent patents that Microsoft was found guilty of violating. This information was taken from the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Aug 9, 2019 · Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft now owns the licensing and the patent rights to the audio compression technology that was developed, a technology better known as MP3.

May 16, 2017 · Key patents held on the MP3 audio format expired last month – and it's taken three weeks for anyone to notice. And the Fraunhofer Institute has declined to renew the intellectual property it owns on the MPEG Audio Layer III technology – as well as terminating its licensing programme.

Feb 8, 2025 · In a world with super fast Internet speeds and the abstracting away of music formats behind streaming services, few people still care about MP3. The last patents for the MP3 format expired in...

With the expiration of US Patent 5,812,672 on 22 September 2015, both encoding and decoding of MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer III) are probably patent-free in the United States. In most other countries it already was patent free.

Mar 4, 2007 · The patent claims of those and others are increasingly being backed up by aggressive enforcement efforts, including lawsuits and even seizures of music players by customs authorities.

On April 23, 2017, Technicolor’s mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated. We thank all of our licensees for their great support in making mp3 the defacto audio …

Apr 16, 2017 · If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 when U.S. Patent 6,009,399, held by and administered by Technicolor, expired.