Just curious as to what the real legal situation of Lame is. All the servers that host LAME compiles are either in a non-software patent recognising country or owned by a person that lives in one of those countries. (Russia, Brazil) But, there are so many audio related programs out there that include it in their main installs and are hosted on a server in a software patent recognising country yet they don't seem to be getting into trouble. Is anyone enforcing this anymore?

It's illegal, since noone is paying patent fees to the patent holders.

But the patent holders that were enforcing them (FhG and Thomson) seem not to care anymore.

Regards;

Roberto.

Has anyone in recent times (last year) actually gotten into trouble?
Just thinking because there are so many mirrors at Mitiok's and I doubt that all of them are "untouchable"

Gabriel can correct me if I make a mistake in my assumptions here:

1) The sourcecode for LAME is legal to obtain and tinker around with.

2) Binary compiles are illegal unless you pay license-fees to Frauenhofer/Thompson.

3) Those audio-related programs COULD be paying said fees for the use of LAME.

4) Enforcing. I do not know. Haven't heard anything about active enforcing. Maybe they are laying low perparing for the big bust.

Ah, rumourmongering

Freeware programs like CDex and dBpowerAMP paying licensing fees and still remaining free? Not a chance! It seems that any program that contains Lame is distributed from just about any country and server but for some reason when the Lame binary is being distributed separately, it is always being distributed from an untouchable server. Nevermind, none of the patent holders seem to care too much about Lame.

My mistake. i was thinking of commercial software using Lame. Though I doubt they do too

There is commercial software that uses LAME legally. Media Jukebox uses LAME and they are paying licensing fees.

wavelab 4 also uses LAME

I wonder how will it be with MP4/AAC... Since patent holders don't seem to care, and the specs can be acquired online, a new open source codec based on MPEG4 (for educational purposes only ) can be created very soon, repeating the LAME story again, and maybe outperforming the original commercial codecs (Nero AAC, QuickTime, PsyTel, etc...) just like LAME did.
What do you guys think? Am i wrong?

What is illegal is to redistribute binaries without a licence agreement.
Binaries themselves are perfectly legal. Anyone could download source code and compile it in order to use the resulting binary.

As a side note, I'd like to point something: Blade was harmful (because of its quality) for mp3, and so for the patent holders. Lame is not harmful for mp3, but instead Lame is promoting mp3.

Some commercial software publisher are using Lame in their products perfectly legally by also paying license fees to the patent holders.
But by using Lame instead of and FhG encoder they are saving 2.5$ per copy (the additionnal cost of mp3 implementation from FhG).

The Lame project is providing a technology implementation, but not the license on this technology.

Yes, their lawyers are very active for AAC, mp3 is old hat...