The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft institute and Thomson Multimedia have finally decided to charge royalties not only on mp3 encoders, as they have in the past, but also on mp3 decoders.
What does this mean?
It means that anyone who creates or sells an mp3 decoder (mp3 player) will now be forced to pay Fraunhofer/Thomson in order to do so.
Now seems to be a really good time to dump mp3 and start using Ogg Vorbis and specifically, the Ogg Vorbis Codec for real.