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“(The patent) helped us to be in a good position when we went to licensing which we did in collaboration with Thomson (the company was renamed to Technicolor). Neither Erlangen-Nuremberg University nor Fraunhofer IIS developed-user products to be sold directly. The licensing revenue generated by the mp3 patent has paid for a huge amount of research work at Fraunhofer. It was and still is a steady revenue stream that has generated a large double-digit number of millions of euros. We reinvested this money back into R&D. The intellectual property generated royalties and the royalties generated R&D. At Fraunhofer, hundreds of jobs have been created and people have estimated the job impact of the whole mp3 technology in Germany alone to be thousands of jobs”. Karlheinz Brandenburg of the celebrated mp3 invention team (digital communication).