MP3’s Loss, Open Source’s Gain?

Alcatel-Lucent isn’t the only winner in a federal jury’s $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format… Now, with a cloud over the de facto industry standard, companies that rely on MP3 may finally have sufficient motivation to move on. And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.

This raises some good points, but MP3 is not a format that holds anyone back as far as I can tell. Of course there’s DRM, but that’s through music stores, not personal collections. Support is everywhere and it can be encoded all the way up to 320KBps. Other formats may have other advantages, but would they sway you to recode your entire collection to that format?

Source: Slashdot