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 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 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.

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: The Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (Japanese: ; Korean: , , "Hanil Gibon Joyak") was signed on June 22, 1965. It established basic diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea.

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: 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: Mary Dixon Kies (March 21, 1752 – 1837) was an American inventor. On May 5, 1809, her patent for a new technique of weaving straw with silk and thread to make hats was signed by President James Madison. She was the first woman to receive a U.S. Patent.

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 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: 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 Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property (JTIP) is a student-edited journal of the Tulane University Law School. JTIP examines legal issues relating to technology, including topics such as antitrust, computer law, contracts, constitutional law, copyrights, information privacy, patents, torts, trade secrets, trademarks, and all other policy implications of law and technology in society.

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: In the second half of '90s, MP3 files began to spread on the Internet. The popularity of MP3s began to rise rapidly with the advent of Nullsoft's audio player Winamp, released in 1997. In 1998, the first portable solid state digital audio player MPMan, developed by SaeHan Information Systems which is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, was released and the Rio PMP300 was sold afterwards in 1998, despite legal suppression efforts by the RIAA.

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: 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: 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: Two core functional treaties, the Treaty on European Union (originally signed in Maastricht in 1992) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (originally signed in Rome in 1957 as the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community), lay out how the EU operates, and there are a number of satellite treaties which are interconnected with them. The treaties have been repeatedly amended by other treaties over the 65 years since they were first signed. The consolidated version of the two core treaties is regularly published by the European Commission.

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: 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.

Question: The basis of the place where basic MP3 decoding and technology patent are free began with the signing of what?
Answer: the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union