paragraph_text: Technicolor (formerly called Thomson Consumer Electronics) claims to control MP3 licensing of the Layer 3 patents in many countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and EU countries. Technicolor has been actively enforcing these patents.

paragraph_text: Other lossy formats exist. Among these, mp3PRO, AAC, and MP2 are all members of the same technological family as MP3 and depend on roughly similar psychoacoustic models. The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft owns many of the basic patents underlying these formats as well, with others held by Dolby Labs, Sony, Thomson Consumer Electronics, and AT&T.

paragraph_text: Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits. CMOS technology is also used for several analog circuits such as image sensors (CMOS sensor), data converters, and highly integrated transceivers for many types of communication. Frank Wanlass invented CMOS in 1963 while at Fairchild Semiconductor and was granted US patent 3,356,858 in 1967. In this groundbreaking patent, the fabrication of CMOS devices was outlined, on the basis of thermal oxidation of a silicon substrate to yield a layer of silicon dioxide located between the drain contact and the source contact .

paragraph_text: Sisvel S.p.A. and its U.S. subsidiary Audio MPEG, Inc. previously sued Thomson for patent infringement on MP3 technology, but those disputes were resolved in November 2005 with Sisvel granting Thomson a license to their patents. Motorola followed soon after, and signed with Sisvel to license MP3-related patents in December 2005. Except for three patents, the US patents administered by Sisvel had all expired in 2015, however (the exceptions are: U.S. Patent 5,878,080, expires February 2017, U.S. Patent 5,850,456, expires February 2017 and U.S. Patent 5,960,037, expires 9. April 2017.

paragraph_text: An exception is the United States, where patents filed prior to 8 June 1995 expire 17 years after the publication date of the patent, but application extensions make it possible for a patent to issue much later than normally expected (see submarine patents). The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable. If only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding has been patent-free in the US since 22 September 2015 when U.S. Patent 5,812,672 expired which had a PCT filing in October 1992. If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology will be patent-free in the United States on 30 December 2017 when U.S. Patent 5,703,999, held by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and administered by Technicolor, expires.

paragraph_text: The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on 6 December 1991 as ISO CD 11172. In most countries, patents cannot be filed after prior art has been made public, and patents expire 20 years after the initial filing date, which can be up to 12 months later for filings in other countries. As a result, patents required to implement MP3 expired in most countries by December 2012, 21 years after the publication of ISO CD 11172.

paragraph_text: In February 2007, Texas MP3 Technologies sued Apple, Samsung Electronics and Sandisk in eastern Texas federal court, claiming infringement of a portable MP3 player patent that Texas MP3 said it had been assigned. Apple, Samsung, and Sandisk all settled the claims against them in January 2009.

paragraph_text: In September 2006, German officials seized MP3 players from SanDisk's booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction on behalf of Sisvel against SanDisk in a dispute over licensing rights. The injunction was later reversed by a Berlin judge, but that reversal was in turn blocked the same day by another judge from the same court, "bringing the Patent Wild West to Germany" in the words of one commentator.

paragraph_text: In November 1997, the website mp3.com was offering thousands of MP3s created by independent artists for free. The small size of MP3 files enabled widespread peer-to-peer file sharing of music ripped from CDs, which would have previously been nearly impossible. The first large peer-to-peer filesharing network, Napster, was launched in 1999.

paragraph_text: The idea for the original Eidophor was conceived in 1939 in Zurich by Dr. Fritz Fischer and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, with the first prototype being unveiled in 1943. A patent was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (patent no. 2,391,451) to Friederich Ernst Fischer for the "Process and appliance for projecting television pictures" on 25 December 1945.

paragraph_text: In September 1998, the Fraunhofer Institute sent a letter to several developers of MP3 software stating that a license was required to "distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders". The letter claimed that unlicensed products "infringe the patent rights of Fraunhofer and Thomson. To make, sell and/or distribute products using the [MPEG Layer-3] standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us."

paragraph_text: However, several de facto standards for tag formats exist. As of 2010, the most widespread are ID3v1 and ID3v2, and the more recently introduced APEv2. These tags are normally embedded at the beginning or end of MP3 files, separate from the actual MP3 frame data. MP3 decoders either extract information from the tags, or just treat them as ignorable, non-MP3 junk data.

paragraph_text: Besides lossy compression methods, lossless formats are a significant alternative to MP3 because they provide unaltered audio content, though with an increased file size compared to lossy compression. Lossless formats include FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), Apple Lossless and many others.

paragraph_text: A more sophisticated MP3 encoder can produce variable bitrate audio. MPEG audio may use bitrate switching on a per-frame basis, but only layer III decoders must support it. VBR is used when the goal is to achieve a fixed level of quality. The final file size of a VBR encoding is less predictable than with constant bitrate. Average bitrate is VBR implemented as a compromise between the two: the bitrate is allowed to vary for more consistent quality, but is controlled to remain near an average value chosen by the user, for predictable file sizes. Although an MP3 decoder must support VBR to be standards compliant, historically some decoders have bugs with VBR decoding, particularly before VBR encoders became widespread.

paragraph_text: An in-depth study of MP3 audio quality, sound artist and composer Ryan Maguire's project "The Ghost in the MP3" isolates the sounds lost during MP3 compression. In 2015, he released the track "moDernisT" (an anagram of "Tom's Diner"), composed exclusively from the sounds deleted during MP3 compression of the song "Tom's Diner", the track originally used in the formulation of the MP3 standard. A detailed account of the techniques used to isolate the sounds deleted during MP3 compression, along with the conceptual motivation for the project, was published in the 2014 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference.

paragraph_text: M - Systems, an Israeli company later acquired by SanDisk, filed the first patent for a USB flash drive in April 1999, known as a DiskOnKey. Later in 1999, IBM filed an invention disclosure by one of its employees. Flash drives were sold initially by Trek 2000 International, a company in Singapore, which began selling in early 2000. IBM became the first to sell USB flash drives in the United States in 2000. The initial storage capacity of a flash drive was 8 MB. Another version of the flash drive, described as a pen drive, was also developed. Pua Khein - Seng from Malaysia has been credited with this invention. Patent disputes have arisen over the years, with competing companies including Singaporean company Trek Technology and Chinese company Netac Technology, attempting to enforce their patents. Trek won a suit in Singapore, but has lost battles in other countries. Netac Technology has brought lawsuits against PNY Technologies, Lenovo, aigo, Sony, and Taiwan's Acer and Tai Guen Enterprise Co.

paragraph_text: The Greek economy is classified as advanced and high-income. Greece was a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC). In 1979 the accession of the country in the European Communities and the single market was signed, and the process was completed in 1982. Greece was accepted into the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union on 19 June 2000, and in January 2001 adopted the Euro as its currency, replacing the Greek drachma at an exchange rate of 340.75 drachma to the Euro. Greece is also a member of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, and is ranked 24th on the KOF Globalization Index for 2013.

paragraph_text: An additional extension to MPEG-2 is named MPEG-2.5 audio, as MPEG-3 already had a different meaning. This extension was developed at Fraunhofer IIS, the registered MP3 patent holders. Like MPEG-2, MPEG-2.5 adds new sampling rates exactly half of that previously possible with MPEG-2. It thus widens the scope of MP3 to include human speech and other applications requiring only 25% of the frequency reproduction possible with MPEG-1. While not an ISO recognized standard, MPEG-2.5 is widely supported by both inexpensive and brand name digital audio players as well as computer software based MP3 encoders and decoders. A sample rate comparison between MPEG-1, 2 and 2.5 is given further down. MPEG-2.5 was not developed by MPEG and was never approved as an international standard. MPEG-2.5 is thus an unofficial or proprietary extension to the MP3 format.

paragraph_text: Non-standard bit rates up to 640 kbit/s can be achieved with the LAME encoder and the freeformat option, although few MP3 players can play those files. According to the ISO standard, decoders are only required to be able to decode streams up to 320 kbit/s.

paragraph_text: The basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is patent-free in the European Union, all patents having expired there. In the United States, the technology will be substantially patent-free on 31 December 2017 (see below). The majority of MP3 patents expired in the US between 2007 and 2015.

Question: When was Greece accepted into the union where the basic MP3 decoding and technology is patent free?
Answer: 19 June 2000