Edited by author 08-28-2002 03:12 PM
So far, this is all just Slashdot-inspired hysteria. Has anyone seen a single place where Thomson has said "we're changing our policy so from now on free players/decoders have to pay the licensing fee"? This whole brouhaha looks like nothing more than a single sentence accidentally being left off of their web page after they updated the pricing. Even this letter doesn't point to a *single* statement by Thomson that they have changed their licensing procedures.

(Slashdot can't even get the basics right: "Now not only mp3 encoders but also mp3 decoders require a license." *Commercially* available MP3 decoders always had to pay licensing fees. The exemption was only for non-commercial decoders.)

Oh, and you know when they made this change? Sometime back in 2001 (go to archive.org and see what Thomson's licensing page looked like in Nov. 2001).