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•1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
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•January 1988 - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
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•April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3
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•1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
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•1993 - MPEG-1 standard published
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•1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later.
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•November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3
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•September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
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•1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.
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•February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.