John Watlington wrote: > EVERY codec need licenses. I know that the FOSS community > thinks that Theora is unencumbered, but it has never been tested > in court (there hasn't ever been anybody worth suing using it.)
Google, Opera, and Mozilla have all funded work on Theora and are distributing implementations of it. Over a hundred million copies. All three have performed internal legal analyses. All three have concluded that it is not a patent risk, and can be distributed royalty-free. Really. Theora and Vorbis are clear according to these three. Other distributors include Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, and every other Linux distributor. Major video games like Ghostbusters and Chronicles of Riddick use Theora and Vorbis. So "there hasn't ever been anybody worth suing" seems untrue to me. > This becomes a real problem when we start asking hardware > vendors to provide firmware supporting these "free" codecs. > If they provide them, they then become a choice target for an > infringement suit. These codecs have been out for a decade. No one has ever been sued. No one has ever been threatened with a lawsuit. No one has ever claimed to hold a patent that applies to any of them. > In past jobs I've purchased codecs, and a large part of what is > being purchased is indemnity against infringement lawsuits. Really? The MPEG-LA licenses explicitly contain zero indemnity. I'm not aware of anyone who actually provides indemnity for codec patent infringement. --Ben
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel