On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 10:10:44AM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote: > If they actually cared, I suspect xmms and several other groups would have > been contacted by lawyers by now. As Andrew noted, there are also legal > avenues of defense as well. they claim us$ 0.75 per unit or some fix price (pc software, mp3 decoder) until 2001 they explicitely excluded "for free" (as in beer) software from the decoder fee, but they removed that when redesigning their site. see http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html and http://web.archive.org/web/20001212023000/mp3licensing.com/royalty/swdec.html (the old terms) after someone mentioned that change about 1 year late on slashdot, redhat took out the mp3 decoders from their distro. but even the old terms would be a problem for distributions (even debian) as the "tax exempt" is only granted for "decoders distributed free-of-charge for personal use [how about usage in companies?] over the internet" [cd distributions of debian, yadayada] they probably won't go after the free players even despite of these facts. makes bad press (and alternatives even more attractive) and (potentially) reduces the user base. patrick mauritz -- the satisfaction of finishing is worth it all
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