@AC
Most www animtians are flash these days, hardly an improvement. But the GIF patents expired in 2007, so there is little impetus now to pay the royalties that unisys demanded. 2012 / 2017 is the expiration years for mp3 patents, till then you will be giving alms to Fraunhofer for every single mp3 capable device you buy. Your cost for convenience on a personal level may be negligible, but for HW producers that churn out units by the millions with paper thin margins, pennies and cent to Fraunhofer accounts takes a good sized chunk out of their margins.
What Fraunhofer doesn't seem to get, is that the road from a Chinese manufacturing plant to the EU market is long and arduous. It would make more sense to ensure that products shipped by the container load to EU are fully licensed. Enforcing licensing requirements on the trade show floor, where much of what is being showed is just prototypes anyways, adds more hurdles in bringing product to market, and could very well result in fewer overall unit royalties. This coupled with the ill will it generates, could bring about more uptake of royalty free alternatives, such as ogg.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
