On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Adam Conrad wrote: > As I understand it, it's only the end-users of encoders (not the writers or > distributors) who are subject to the licensing fee. That said, Pandora is > in the Netherlands, so couldn't the issue be skirted by making the package > non-US/non-free, and pointing the end user towards docs which explain the > situation to them, should the choose to download and use it?
There are several mirrors of non-US in Germany. And according to [1] the patents are also valid in the Netherlands. > In the end, it looks to me like it's the end user's responsibility here, not > the distributor, and I'd hate to see a package not make it in because The > Debian Project is going to assume that their US and German users are > unwilling to read a disclaimer and act accordingly. We must ensure that there's no legal risk for any of our mirrors or it's a danger for Debian as a whole. > ... Adam cu Adrian [1] http://mp3licensing.com/patents.html -- Nicht weil die Dinge schwierig sind wagen wir sie nicht, sondern weil wir sie nicht wagen sind sie schwierig.
