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Step 3: So What Is Illegal?
What is illegal is the distribution of copywritten material, which is quite abundant within the MP3 community. So long as the copyright holder of the music has given permission to distribute that music in the mp3 format, then those files are legal for all to use. The reality is that there are plenty of sites out there that offer music that has not been authorized for distribution by the artist or by the label.
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Fraunhofer received a patent in April 1989 for MP3 in Germany and in 1992 Fraunhofer’s algorithm was integrated in MPEG-1 for which the specification was published in 1993.
1994 MPEG-2 and its specification was published the following year in 1995.
January 26th, 1995 saw Fraunhofer apply for the patent of MP3 in the USA and was granted it on November 26th, 1996.
September 1998 Fraunhofer contacted independent developers of MP3 encoders (rippers) and decoders (players) that were based on the ISO source code. Fraunhofer had patent protection on the algorithm they were using and developers who wanted to develop their software applications further would have to apply to Fraunhofer for licence.
The mp3 format has nothing to do with Metallica. They caused a commotion when they had huge printed lists of users that were sharing their music on napster and got the lawyers involved. Whether Metallica were the first artists to put mp3's of their music on the net (which i really doubt), is irrelevant.