Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When were MP3s invented?
In the aspects of MP3 pertaining to audio compression—the aspect of the standard most apparent to end-users (and for which is it best known)—MP3 uses lossy data-compression to encode data using inexact approximations and the partial discarding of data. This allows a large reduction in file sizes when compared to uncompressed audio. The combination of small size and acceptable fidelity led to a boom in the distribution of music over the Internet in the mid- to late-1990s, with MP3 serving as an enabling technology at a time when bandwidth and storage were still at a premium. The MP3 format soon became associated with controversies surrounding copyright infringement, music piracy, and the file ripping/sharing services MP3.com and Napster, among others. With the advent of portable media players, a product category also including smartphones, MP3 support remains near-universal.
MusicDNA was created by Norwegian developer Dagfinn Bach, Chief Executive Officer of Bach Technology. German developer Karlheinz Brandenburg, credited with the invention of the .mp3 file, is one of the investors in this project. 
Armin Wirth bought, as CEO and owner of Feiyr, the music platform Djtunes for €2,3 million, in 2013. DJTunes was financed by Karlheinz Brandenburg who invented MP3.
The resulting litigation and judgments against MP3.com, totaling over $53 million, pushed MP3.com into severe financial difficulties which were averted by a merger with Vivendi Universal.
MP3 web releases
Following the vinyl release a number of MP3 versions quickly surfaced on the web. A select number of people involved in the Smashing Pumpkins online fan community received one of the 25 releases. Using audio equipment they had immediate access to, these tracks were recorded, encoded to MP3, and quickly released for the masses. Later MP3 releases may be from one of the CD sources listed above or newer lesser known transfers. The Smashing Pumpkins' official site also had the full 25 tracks for download in both mp3 format (at 320kbit/s) and in RealAudio format. In 2007, the album was once again posted for download on the newly reopened SmashingPumpkins.com.
The idea to purchase the MP3.com domain arose when Flores was monitoring search traffic on filez.com, a FTP search site whose first incarnation provided an easy to use graphical interface for searching for various types of files including software, graphics, video and audio. The first version of files utilized an existing free search engine developed by graduate students (led by Tor Egge, who later founded Fast Search and Transfer based on this search engine) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Flores noticed in his review of the search logs that people were searching for 'mp3'.
Among the few first MP3 blogs were Tonspion, Buzzgrinder, Fluxblog, Stereogum and Said the Gramophone. Tonspion is the first MP3 blog in Germany and started in 1998 with reviews and downloads that international artists and labels gave out free on the web. Buzzgrinder began in 2001 as a way for musician SethW to fill time on the road. Stereogum began as a music-related LiveJournal in 2002, though its format was focused on indie/pop gossip rather than MP3s. Fluxblog (also founded in 2002) trumpeted LCD Soundsystem's "Yeah (Stupid Version)" in early 2004 brought increased attention to MP3 blogs, while Montreal-based Said the Gramophone, founded in 2003, was among the first websites to write about artists like Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade and Tune-Yards. A July, 2004 story by Reuters and an August, 2004 story on National Public Radio further galvanized the trend, and today there are thousands of MP3 blogs covering a cornucopia of musical styles.
MCA postponed the release of "Ones and Zeros" for several reasons, including "that the Christmas season was a better season for established artists". Skycycle's belief "that the quickly increasing popularity of the Internet could make MP3 a viable and effective promotional tool", combined with the growing impatience of the fans due to the many delays, led to the band releasing several songs as free MP3s on their website, which was still rarely done in that time. Although the release and distribution of MP3s were not covered in their contract, Isaacs was told "that the presence of MP3s on our site was 'upsetting' MCA executives [and] that this order came from the highest regions of the corporate structure at MCA and Universal, which believed that any support for the MP3 format was unacceptable." Although they took down the MP3s, Skycycle were dropped from MCA on January 26, 2000 and "Ones and Zeros" was never released.
Founded in 1998, the same year as MP3.com, MP3 Newswire is the oldest active news site devoted to digital media technology. Notable for its series of essays that chronicled the rise of digital music and the Internet’s acrimonious relationship with the record industry, MP3 Newswire initially was started to review and report on the latest products and technological advances. But opinion pieces were few and far between in the pre and early Napster days and MP3 Newswire filled the gap.
In April 2004, after the demise of the original MP3.com in December 2003, Trusonic (formerly an MP3.com division) partnered with GarageBand.com to revive "most" of the original MP3.com archive. An inventory of 250,000 artists representing 1.7 million songs. Using the name "MP3isBack.com", former MP3.com account holders were able recover their music from Trusonic and automatically transfer the music content to GarageBand.com. The MP3isBack.com site expired sometime between May and November of 2005.
These technical limitations inherently prevent MP3 from providing critically transparent quality at any bitrate. This makes Layer II sound quality actually superior to MP3 audio, when it is used at a high enough bitrate to avoid noticeable artifacts. The term "transparent" often gets misused, however. The quality of MP3 (and other codecs) is sometimes called "transparent," even at impossibly low bitrates, when what is really meant is "good quality on average/non-critical material," or perhaps "exhibiting only non-annoying artifacts."
An exception is the United States, where patents in force but filed prior to 8 June 1995 expire after the later of 17 years from the issue date or 20 years from the priority date. A lengthy patent prosecution process may result in a patent issuing much later than normally expected (see submarine patents). The various MP3-related patents expired on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the United States.[71] Patents for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 filed 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 , which had a PCT filing in October 1992, expired.[72][73][74] If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017, when , held[75] and administered by Technicolor,[76] expired. As a result, many free and open-source software projects, such as the Fedora operating system, have decided to start shipping MP3 support by default, and users will no longer have to resort to installing unofficial packages maintained by third party software repositories for MP3 playback or encoding.[77]
Bach Technology is a Norwegian company that develops and licenses digital music technology, notably MusicDNA to provide custom, Internet updated multi-media content - like videos, song lyrics, or social media - while audio is played. It has partnered with the company that invented MP3, Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), for technical expertise. Two of its key investors are former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Sony Music Entertainment, Shigeo Maruyama, and MP3's inventor, Karlheinz Brandenburg.
at Curlie , The Story of MP3: How MP3 was invented, by Fraunhofer IIS , Over 1000 articles from 1999-2011 focused on MP3 and digital audio , MPEG Official Web site , MP3 , A More Loss-Tolerant RTP Payload Format for MP3 Audio , The audio/mpeg Media Type
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.[39][64][65][66] 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 a type of 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. The most evolved LAME MP3 encoder supports the generation of VBR, ABR, and even the ancient CBR MP3 formats.
In September 2009, a plug-in hybrid version of the MP3 was launched, following trials in 2008 by the New York City Police Department. It has a 125 cc engine and a battery-driven electric motor, with a regenerative braking system. The vehicle has three user-selected variants of hybrid drive to create a vehicle capable of up to and in 5 seconds when both methods of propulsion are used. In electric-only mode the MP3 can travel a distance of at a maximum speed of . When both power sources are used the MP3 can run for a maximum of 25 minutes, with performance equivalent to a 250 cc scooter. When powered solely by the petrol engine the MP3 is slower than other 125 cc machines due to its weight: compared with for the petrol-only model.
A transparency threshold is a given value at which transparency is reached. It is commonly used to describe compressed data bitrates. For example, the transparency threshold for MP3 to Linear PCM audio is said to be between 175 and 245 kbit/s, at 44.1 kHz, when encoded as VBR MP3 (corresponding to the -V3 and -V0 settings of the highly popular LAME MP3 encoder). This means that when an MP3 that was encoded at those bitrates is being played back, it is indistinguishable from the original PCM, and the compression is transparent to the listener.
Christopher Sabec was one of the first managers of major label artists to promote the downloading of MP3s as a promotional and marketing tool. In 1998, Christopher, was interviewed by then CEO of MP3.com, Michael Robertson, where he talked about how MP3s were going to change the music industry. 
When performing lossy audio encoding, such as creating an MP3 data stream, there is a trade-off between the amount of data generated and the sound quality of the results. The person generating an MP3 selects a bit rate, which specifies how many kilobits per second of audio is desired. The higher the bit rate, the larger the MP3 data stream will be, and, generally, the closer it will sound to the original recording. With too low a bit rate, compression artifacts (i.e., sounds that were not present in the original recording) may be audible in the reproduction. Some audio is hard to compress because of its randomness and sharp attacks. When this type of audio is compressed, artifacts such as ringing or pre-echo are usually heard. A sample of applause or a triangle instrument with a relatively low bit rate provide good examples of compression artifacts. Most subjective testings of perceptual codecs tend to avoid using these types of sound materials, however, the artifacts generated by percussive sounds are barely perceptible due to the specific temporal masking feature of the 32 sub-band filterbank of Layer II on which the format is based.
Bach Technology A.S., founded by Dagfinn Bach and Karlheinz Brandenburg, is headquartered in Bergen, Norway. Bach was instrumental in the development of digital music technology and MP3 technology in 1993. He is the company's president. Brandenburg's experience is in the media; He worked for Bertelsmann in Germany. The company has partnered with the company that invented MP3, Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) in Germany, for their technical expertise. Investors include the former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Sony Music Entertainment, Shigeo Maruyama, and MP3's inventor Karlheinz Brandenburg.
An MP3 file is made up of MP3 frames, which consist of a header and a data block. This sequence of frames is called an elementary stream. Due to the "byte reservoir", frames are not independent items and cannot usually be extracted on arbitrary frame boundaries. The MP3 Data blocks contain the (compressed) audio information in terms of frequencies and amplitudes. The diagram shows that the MP3 Header consists of a sync word, which is used to identify the beginning of a valid frame. This is followed by a bit indicating that this is the MPEG standard and two bits that indicate that layer 3 is used; hence MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MP3. After this, the values will differ, depending on the MP3 file. ISO/IEC 11172-3 defines the range of values for each section of the header along with the specification of the header. Most MP3 files today contain ID3 metadata, which precedes or follows the MP3 frames, as noted in the diagram. The data stream can contain an optional checksum.
It was originally claimed that mp3PRO files were compatible with existing MP3 decoders, and that the SBR data could simply be ignored. The reality was that MP3 players lacking specific mp3PRO decoding capability experienced a significant reduction in audio quality when playing mp3PRO files as only the lower half of the original frequency range is available.
How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy (Also published as How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime?, How Music Got Free: The Inventor, The Mogul and the Thief, and How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention) is a non-fiction book by journalist Stephen Witt. The book chronicles the invention of the MP3 format for audio information, detailing the efforts by researchers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg to analyze human hearing and successfully compress songs in a form that can be easily transmitted. Witt also documents the rise of the warez scene and spread of copyright-infringing efforts online while detailing the campaigns by music industry executives such as Doug Morris to adapt to changing technology.
MP3.com in conjunction with tomgreen.com ran a remix competition where several remixes of the song were profiled on Tom Green's website, promising the winner (who was to be chosen by total number of downloads and song plays) a flight to New York to see a taping of "The Tom Green Show". However, the contest was cancelled when MP3.com changed owners and Green's popularity waned.
Constraining Innovators: In this section Lessig describes how innovators are being constrained and amongst the examples he uses he gives the company MP3.com. In 2000 this company launched a service that would allow users to have a "lockbox" to which they could upload their music and access it anywhere. Shortly after the service was launched several major record companies sued the company and judgement was later entered for Vivendi against MP3.com. A year later Vivendi bought MP3.com. He also describes how innovators are hampered both the uncertainty in the law and the content industry's attempt to use to law to regulate the internet in an attempt to protect their interests. Also in this section he describes how, when new technologies are invented, Congress has attempted to strike a balance so as to protect these new technologies from the older ones. He suggests that this balance has now changed and uses as an example Internet radio which he suggests has been burdened by regulations and royalty payments that broadcasters have not been.