On Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 10:17:42PM -0500, Alejandro Forero Cuervo wrote:
Tell me where on this page:
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html
...you find where it says "royalty-free distribution of free decoders."
What makes you think you need to agree to those royalties for a *decoder*?
The fact that your country isn't the ONLY one on Earth and that each one has it's own laws?
Those royalties are for a series of patents that seem to apply to encoders, not decoders. You can find a listing in:
http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html
My understanding is that you only need to license this patents if you distribute an *encoder*. If you need to license those patents, you also have to agree to some per-decoder fee, but that doesn't mean you need to license them for a decoder. This has been througly discussed in debian-legal and other mailing lists.
If you find that magic phrase, let me know and we'll drop mp3 support into Fedora Core tomorrow. :)
I'd settle for an IQ test before being allowed to sign up on these lists. But what the hell you opened the can: Instead of dropping MP3 support IN, why not drop up2date into a blender like in the Pink Floyd video? I've used every release to date and none seem to be able to handle more than a few downloads of patches at a time and most of the time it fails out of the box. It reminds me of when I update XP, you have to do it one at a time or it freezes up. Out of the box.
I believe you should do that. Debian, after discussing the legal status of doing so, has decided to include MP3 *decoding* support (not *encoding*) and there are many free software decoders around, whose authors have never licensed any of Thomson patents.
And Debian isn't a company or corporation. Therefore Debian has less to worry about by doing so. Novell is a business, they have to actually worry about these types of things.
It seems this was discussed in Slashdot at some point in 2003 when a report claimed it wasn't legally allowed to distribute free decoders anymore. At this point many distributions decided to drop MP3 support. However, it seems this report was bogus, as reported in:
I bet I could find news reports saying they found intelligent life once at a Republican convention. Doesn't make it true.
I hope this helps.
Alejo. http://azul.freaks-unidos.net/
---=( Comunidad de Usuarios de Software Libre en Colombia )=--- ---=( http://bachue.com/colibri )=--=( colibri@bachue.com )=---