On Dienstag, 4. August 2015 13:36:03 CEST, Martin Sandsmark wrote:
On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 10:53:16PM +1200, Ben Cooksley wrote:
On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Martin Sandsmark
<martin.sandsm...@kde.org> wrote:
But what kind of legal risk are we talking about here?
The same one Redhat / Fedora don't like at all, and which SUSE is
working around...
But what are these? I've never heard anything concrete
MPEG2 (until 2018), mp3 (until 2017) and h264 (until farfaraway) are still
patented. The patents are largely unchallenged (no prior art claims) and valid
by US laws (while most of the rest of the world considers the idea to patent
math or algorithms ridiculous)
=> You're violating US laws (no matter how ridiculous they are) for sure by
distributing them (w/o permission) and for any company under any US jurisdiction,
that's obviously a problem.
Unlike many/most other software "patents", the MPEG business model is to license usage,
so they *will* sue them (or just demand "a lot of money"™), and it does absolutely not
matter where there servers are located in this regard.
I've not really calculated it, but *every* fedora download would likely cost
them $10 on royalties only.
=> you need a system where patented codecs are fetched *by the user* on demand
:-(
(and from servers that are of course totally neither owned nor sponsored by
RedHat - that would be illegal! ;-)
On top of that, there're legal worries about libdvdcss and libaacs, which are considered
illegal by (far too) many laws across the planet (as they break *cough*
"effective" *cough* copyright protection systems - LOL)
Cheers,
Thomas
See http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/
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