I can say that Thomson and Fraunhofer were not happy about LAME. Probably not news because of the letter that Fraunhofer sent out warning encoder projects that they were infringing on patents. There were internal emails in Thomson about how to potentially shut LAME down with lawsuits. Their own lawyers admitted that it wasn't likely to happen, so they just left it alone and didn't talk about it much to avoid drawing more attention. Companies had to pay a lot more to ship MP3 encoders than decoders. I don't remember the exact figures, but it was like 25 cents per decoder and $1.75 per encoder. Something like that. So if users grabbed a copy of LAME somewhere instead that was a lot of money, but they probably already got you when you bought Windows or a Mac. They just wanted to get you again and again for each program without you realizing it.