Licensing and Patent Issues
AMR codecs incorporate several patents of Nokia Corporation, Telefonaktiebolaget L. M. Ericsson, VoiceAge Corporation and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. VoiceAge Corporation is the License Administrator for the AMR and AMR-WB+ patent pools. VoiceAge also accepts submission of patents for determination of their possible essentiality to these standards.
The initial fee for professional content creation tools and "real-time channel" products is 6,500 USD. The minimum annual royalty is $10,000, which (in the first year) excludes the initial fee. Per-channel license fees fall from $0.99 to $0.50 with volume, up to a maximum of $2 million annually.
In the category of personal computer products (e.g. media players), the AMR decoder is licensed for free. The license fee for a sold encoder falls from $0.40 to $0.30 with volume, up to a maximum of $300,000 annually. The minimum annual royalty is not applied to licensed products which fall under the category of personal computer products and use only the free decoder.
More information:
- VoiceAge licensing information, including pricing to license the AMR codecs
- 3GPP legal issues
- The 3G Patent Platform and its licensing policy
- AMR Codecs as Shared Libraries - legal notices for usage of amrnb and amrwb libraries based on the reference implementation
Read more about this topic: Adaptive Multi-Rate Audio Codec
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