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: > > http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/30321 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 )=--=( [EMAIL PROTECTED] )=--- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
