In reply to:

---

There has always been a $0.75 charge for MP3 but some (mostly non commercial) applications have conveniently overlooked that.

---

As i read it, free players were previously excluded from the licensing charge, but now they have changed their policy and are charging for all decoders.

Are you sure free / noncommercial software always had to pay the fee?

I remember years ago WinAMP quickly changed their decoder because they were getting hastled by Thompson/Fraunhofer for licensing fees. They simply changed to a decoder that did not use any Thompson/Fraunhofer sourcecode.

Thankfully we still have Ogg Vorbis