This is in the tradition of many geek acronyms, including:
LAME endured some legal difficulties regarding Fraunhofer?'s patent on certain key algorithms involved in MP3 encoding. These patents were intended to prevent anyone from being able to create an MP3 encoder without paying licencing fees to Fraunhofer, something that is difficult to enforce for an open source program.
LAME uses patches against the ISO demonstration source, which is distributed separately. That code is patented, and has a somewhat restrictive copyright, but is available for free (cost). Since that ISO code is only for non-commercial use, a license from Thomson Multimedia may be required.
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