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Re: Avifile package - help needed



On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 09:12:35PM +0100, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
>  I went back to the archived discussion that took place in October, and
>  I'm surprised noone pointed this out.  As far as I can tell, DivX, what
>  that codecs package contains, is illegal.  It started off the Microsoft
>  DLLs for MPEG4, got reverse- engineered and disasembled, patched and
>  compiled again into the DivX codecs.  The license on the original DLLs
>  explicitly forbids reverse- engineering them.  Since the machine in
>  question is in the US (better said: in the same jurisdiction where this
>  reverse-engineering act is illegal) and since there's not even a hint
>  about *who* the author of that CODEC is, even less about it's copyright
>  status, could you PLEASE remove the files from *.d.o machines?

Say, could you cite some proof of this? I've been in some email discussions
with the author of mplayer about what sort of licensing needs to go on with
this and this has a serious impact on the functionality of the player(s)
involved. If there's an post in debian-legal, or even better some public
information source with a statement to this effect, I want to see it before
I tell him we can't redistribute his package or whatever this means.

On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 09:12:35PM +0100, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
>  PS: go to http://xmps.sourceforge.net/, try to find the link to these
>      win32 codecs there.

There's no link to it, but there's no discussion of it, either. This
doesn't help me sort out the issue very much.


Thanks,
Bill
-- 
"The software industry that Microsoft has been the role model for
is built on the premise that customers are not to be trusted with
the technology that they are building their organizations on."
-- Bob Young

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