Mp3 Patents Slowly Dying

So two more mp3 patents expired just last month on the 24th. 2012 should actually be a big year for patents on the encoding technology, with four total due to expire. By Halloween we'll only have 12 left!

You always hear about how mp3 is a patent-encumbered technology, which causes lots of pain for anyone trying to make any tool that deals with audio data. But I rarely hear specifics. Since the technology is pretty old at this point, I started wondering if we're getting to the point where the patents will just expire, and it goes the way of the .gif?

A little searching leads you to this page, listing the 20 patents registered in the U.S. I wanted to get a sense of the timeline we're looking at, so I put together a simple visualization. Looking forward to 2017!

On Quines

$ ./quine.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Had an idea for an easy way to write a quine. This might be cheating.
use strict;

open(my $fh_in, "<", $0) or
    die "Error: Cannot open file $0: $!";

while (<$fh_in>) {
     print;
}

Did I not get the point?

(Okay, okay, quick explanation after the jump)