-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Monday 03 Dec 2007, Linux Lingam wrote: > On Dec 1, 2007 7:52 PM, Raj Mathur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Saturday 01 Dec 2007, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > > > [snip] > > > Is it true that wav and mp3 are > > > considered proprietary and that no FOSS person can listen to > > > them? I am having problems with arichuvadi because of this - > > > everything is in ogg, and no-one except Suse and Mandriva users > > > can use it. > > > > MP3 isn't proprietary, at least not in India. Other countries that > > have software patents may have issues, but then should we care > > about ``the rest of the world''? ;) > > i find this statement hard-to-believe. IIS Fraunhofer cannot or does > not exercise its legal rights over mp3 in india? according to > wikipedia they made 100million euros from mp3 by 2005. you mean to > say if i write a commercial software for mp3 playback or encoding i > don't have to pay IIS fraunhofer? what if i make some commodity > hardware that works with mp3?
IANAL, YMMV, etc. As far as I know: 1. MP3 is covered by software patents. 2. India does not have software patents. When you put (1) and (2) together, the only conclusion that you can reach is that MP3 is not patentable in India, and hence free to use. If you make a music player that renders MP3 files and sell it in India you should not have to pay any patent/licensing fees. If you decide to sell it in some backward country that has software patents, you may need to appease the holder of the MP3 patent with large amounts of money. Regards, - -- Raju - -- Raj Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ Freedom in Technology & Software || February 2008 || http://freed.in/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD4DBQFHU30cyWjQ78xo0X8RAs3GAKCDXFuliU/BwkdRCQ/3Fmt60EGfBQCVHTWK bkxzcr9qpd6CSQdSN8aMAw== =+MFy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Next Event: http://freed.in - February 22/23, 2008 Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
