Re: Likely illegal programs in Knoppix 4.0.2 CD?
Hi Markus and list,
On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 10:46:50AM +0200, Markus Laire wrote:
> On 12/19/05, Klaus Knopper <debian-knoppix@knopper.net> wrote:
> > I think you are confusing a few things here. MP3 itself is not illegal.
> > The Fraunhofer MP3 encoder scheme is patented and has to be commercially
> > licensed for ENCODING. mpg321 (not 123) is an mp3-compatible free/open
> > source player that is, to the best of my knowledge, considered to be
> > legally OK for distribution. It does not use any proprietary code.
>
> At least http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/ seems to claim that
> license is needed also for DEcoding.
Actually, this topic has been discussed on debian-legal, too:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/05/msg00226.html
The outcome was more or less to keep mpg321 in Debian/main because
1. No free software project with mp3 DECODING support had been sued yet,
and has not even received a note from Fraunhofer (which is probably in
their best interest if they want to keep the MP3 format popular, and
also, they are rather interested in commercial licenses for mp3 hardware
stuff).
2. The MP3 software patent claims (about 3 patents) are maybe not
legitimate anyways, though no court decision has been made in either
direction yet. A legal quarrel between Fraunhofer and OSDF would maybe
even kill those patents in the long term, because of either prior art or
non-patentability (it is more of a scientific discovery and not a
specific technical process that is subject to the 3 patents involved).
3. Removing MP3 decoders that don't use the original (copyrighted)
reference implemetation would open a discussion about removing more and
more essential programs that may or may not be subject to patents. It is
better to encounter and win a decision in court than just retreating
every time problems may be ahead.
In my opinion, if you remove MP3 players, you will probably have to
remove ALL decoding/encoding programs that use lossy compression,
because the patent claims would match somehow for OGG-Vorbis, Mpeg-Video
and JPEG as well. If you remove all programs that are covered by
"software patents", you will, as I said before, end up with an empty CD,
and even that may be covered by patents.
I guess you will always have to find a common sense path of what to keep
and what to remove, to the best of your knowledge. If you feel
threatened by patents, you will have to stop actively developing
software, at all, forever.
A simple
print "Hello World!\n";
in perl, would already violate about 7 existing and granted "software
patents". If you have read and understood this e-mail, you are subject
to another patent violation related to formal grammar and interpretation
issues.
So, I'd vote for keeping mpg321.
Regards
-Klaus Knopper
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