In a sense you're right, in that some risks exist because the patent system is broken. OTOH, such claims have yet to be made (that I've heard of) against flac, theora, vorbis, speex, etc. Do you have any references? The other thing is that these formats are unpatented by definition, so newer versions would be patent-free (though I'm not confident that lossless converters would be available in all cases). This cannot be said of formats controlled by a wilful (ab)user of patents. Russell John Andersen wrote:
On Wednesday 31 January 2007, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Nowhere did I claim, nor even hint, that «that speex and vorbis are not violating someone's patent». That's your saying.
That's exactly my point. I've read patent claims against those two formats on the web in the past, as well as the patent claims for the encoding algorithms used to encode flac.
So it seems to me its unsafe to assume, merely because the current rush to ogg is in vouge, that any real escape from this patent nonsense is possible.
As soon as the mp3 owners realizes that any significant portion of their business has left the station they will find ways to make claims against those other formats as they already do against aac. All they need do is find something vaguely similar to their algorithms in speex.
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