I kind of knew when I posted about that story about the British labels backing a new branding effort for MP3 based on compatibility that someone would take me up on my challenge.
Here’s the Ogg Vorbis graphic with thanks to Nido for putting it together so fast and Mike for some suggestions for improvement. Nido include the Gimp project file he used to create the graphic allowing me to address Mike’s suggestions as well as trying to better match the style of the original. I offer up my version with no conditions, restrictions or warranties–have fun with it. I have no doubt that this infringes on some trademark but I actually would welcome a takedown or other claim for the attention it would help draw to Ogg Vorbis as an alternative.
Greg also pointed out in the comments that part of the hesitance around Ogg is the fear of liability. I call shenanigans. This issue was explored in the discussions under WHATWG over the audio and video tags in HTML5. As far as we know, there are no submarine patents on Ogg.
Of course that doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t make a claim, anyway. Device and software makers would not get the traditional indemnities they’d get from a Fraunhofer, sure, but I would lay good money that any number of activist interests would step forward to help out, first and foremost the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.
I tend to credit the poor adoption of Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora to path dependency and ignorance as much as any issues of potential liability. The liability landscape is also not completely unknown, we’ve been there with Linux. I don’t think it is as scary as some make it out, no matter how competitive the media space is versus other classes of software.
Looks great, though links to the png and xcf are missing a hostname.
Yeah, ecto horked the relative URLs when I first posted. I have since fixed it and added an inline display of the final image.
It looks a bit weird that “ogg” is blurry/fuzzy and “100% freedom” is sharp. I would make them both the same.
There is some specific filter in the mp3 version I don’t know to reproduce. It looks like an ink bleed or blend. The edged blue I used is the closest I could come with my limited Gimp/Photoshop skills.
Does anyone else know how to achieve the effect I am referring to in the original logo?
I think the mp3 decoding patents expire in 2011, so it’s a bit of a moot point.
Not a moot point. Ogg Vorbis fares better in blind listening tests than MP3. Submarine patents also mean that one can’t know all the patents that read on something one does with a computer (just ask MPEG LA’s sycophants; as they were on my blog defending the logic why Apple avoids implementing Ogg Vorbis, a patent holder claiming to have something that read on MPEG-related codecs sprang up from out of nowhere). So it’s tough to say that Fraunhofer’s patents cover all. Besides, even within that timeline 2011 leaves plenty of time to lose a patent infringement lawsuit.