Hello!

Does anyone know about a patent on the AMR codec?
And if a patent exists - who is contact for licensing?

On the ETSI IPR search there's only mentioned that "Ericsson
claims to have some patents (pending) around AMR".

The ANSI C code example from 3GPP (26.073) is completely
without any notice of patents, copyright or licence.

I'm happy for *any* answer on this!

Thanks,

     Klaus


(Yes, I did have searched Google, news archives, and so on.)

Aloha,

Klaus Keppler schrieb:
> Does anyone know about a patent on the AMR codec?
> And if a patent exists - who is contact for licensing?
> 
> On the ETSI IPR search there's only mentioned that "Ericsson
> claims to have some patents (pending) around AMR".

goto portal.etsi.org -> guide -> IPR Database -> IPR Search
Select in projects 3GPP/AMR-WB and GSM/AMR-NB. Hit Search ...

... and enjoy reading 94 IPR Declarations.

> The ANSI C code example from 3GPP (26.073) is completely
> without any notice of patents, copyright or licence.

That's not completely correct. Read 26.071 first.
The C code is part of the spec. and therefore copyrighted by 3GPP. 
And it's no example, it is the bit-exact, mandatory implementation 
of the codec.

Wishing a happy day
		LOBI

Moin!

> goto portal.etsi.org -> guide -> IPR Database -> IPR Search
> Select in projects 3GPP/AMR-WB and GSM/AMR-NB. Hit Search ...
> ... and enjoy reading 94 IPR Declarations.

Thanks - I already had that experience... :-)

I'm now in e-mail contact with an ETSI secretary. The problem is:
there's no statement like "AMR codec: Company XYZ. Contact: ...". :-)
To understand the details of different codebooks you need deep knowledge
of audio encoding; thus I don't know if patent A or patent B interfere
with AMR decoding or not...

What I search is either some kind of "AMR license vendor" or - what
I prefer - the solid information that decoding AMR data (using
the 26.073 reference code) doesn't need to be licensed.

> The C code is part of the spec. and therefore copyrighted by 3GPP. 
> And it's no example, it is the bit-exact, mandatory implementation 
> of the codec.

Thanks for this tip!

Have a nice day!

    Klaus