Appendix B: Legal and Financial Issues

When developing a radio stream player, there are two ways to go in choosing which software to build on: open-source or commercial.

Open-source software has the obvious benefit of being free. It is also generally more portable, being able to run on many more platforms. And often you can find an application that will play a wider variety of media formats. However, you generally cannot play DRM enabled media. Also, there are certain file types, like some WMA files, that won’t play unless you install certain windows codecs (found in the win32codecs package). These codecs are not open-source and as a result may not be legal to use in all countries. If you would like to use these codecs, you will probably need to speak to a lawyer first.

Another issue with open-source applications is how they are licensed. For instance, mplayer is licensed under GPL2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html). According to the GPL (versions 1, 2, and 3), if you use GPL-licensed code in your application, you must release the source code of the application. So if you create your own media player based on mplayer’s source, you must also open-source it. However, you can use mplayer in its existing form without having to open-source your application. The MIT and Apache licenses do not place this restriction on you. You may use their source code in proprietary applications.

The other option is to use commercial software, such as Windows Media Player (WMP) by Microsoft, Quicktime by Apple, or RealPlayer by RealNetworks, all of which have SDKs to integrate them into your application. However, we estimate that more than 95% of the radio streams listed on RadioTime are playable by WMP, so you might not need the others. With commercial software of course comes licensing fees. The details for WMP can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/licensing.aspx.

Basically, you may use the WMP SDK for free, but of course you’ll need to be running a Windows operating system, such as Windows CE, which would cost between $3 and $16 per unit. You can also license the Windows Media Components to be put onto your hardware device, without using a Microsoft OS; this licensing will require an up-front fee and will include royalties.

When it comes to decoding MP3, things get legally tricky. Although MP3 has been around for 15 years and is supported by virtually all media players, there are actually a number of different companies who all claim patents on some parts of the MP3 standard and, as a result, demand licensing fees. Some of the companies are Thomson Consumer Electronics, the Fraunhofer Society, and Alcatel-Lucent. The following site lists royalty information from Thomson/Fraunhofer: http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/. Although these companies have generally ignored open-source software, technically, according to Thomson, you need a license even if you use third-party MP3 decoders.

AAC is also covered by patents. Although distributing AAC audio doesn’t require licensing fees, encoding and decoding it does. See here for royalty rates: http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/AAC_fees.cfm.