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Re: legal status of faac, xvid



On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 09:20:13AM -0700, seven sins wrote:
> i am looking for information on how the debian teams
> views  legal status of faac and xvid. work for a
> company where we use debian, folks on the research
> team want to do use these for some reason. before i
> install these i wanted to check on the legal status
> for there quite a bit of messages on it and i am kind
> of clueless about it.

Nobody is really sure about the legal status of contemporary video
codecs. There are more patents on video encoding than you can shake a
stick at. The MPEG-LA claims to hold all the patents applicable to
MPEG, and that all these patents are valid, but since it's impossible
for them to know either of these things they are obviously lying.

It's never been seriously tested in court.

So, get yourself a lawyer and check the details of their malpractice
insurance very carefully.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

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