Before its second birthday, the MP3 was setting fires that its creators couldn't put out.
The people doing Winamp at some point paid a patent fee."ġ997: As MPEG's encoding system got out into the world, it began to spark the imagination of users who definitely weren't thinking of Fraunhofer's bottom line. There were still patent rights we early on decided for a business model where we wouldn't go after freeware authors. The knowledge how to do MP3 decoding was out there in the open. "Winamp was one of the early software which got widely distributed. As he told Joel, that story begins almost three decades ago and ends in 1999, at the dawn of the file-sharing network.
Joel Rose spoke with him about the story of the MP3, and we jumped at the opportunity to get the professor to walk us through the history of the format. Today, Brandenburg is a professor at Ilmenau Technical University at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology – the same organization that funded his efforts as part of the MPEG. 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 technical, acronym-studded descriptions of the differences between various algorithms. The story of the MP3 is the story of how intellectual property became the commodity over which the Internet's greatest wars would be fought, and also how the work that goes into innovating can be forgotten in the face of a technology's rapid spread.
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