It appears that the patent trolls Sisvel are attacking the OpenMoko project, and as part of their strategy the project has chosen to pull all of their downloads whilst they remove any support for MP2 and MP3 files.

The short story is that we are in a protracted battle with some patent trolls. Google for Sisvel. In order to get ourselves in a stronger position, we want to make sure no copies/instances/whatever of patent-infested technologies like MP2 and MP3 exist on our servers. Our phones never shipped with end-user MP3 playback features, but we want to use this opportunity to make sure it’s not even in some remote place somewhere.

As Sisvel aren’t the only ones to sue over MPEG related patents (( note that Microsoft won on appeal very recently, reversing the decision )) it really does bring the message home that MPEG is not a safe technology for audio files and that things like Ogg-Vorbis and FLAC are far better (and safer!) choices in the long run.