On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 08:53:44PM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: > Gabucino <gabucino@mplayerhq.hu> writes: > > Glenn Maynard wrote: > >> One version of VirtualDub could read ASF files, and that was quickly removed. > >> That was back in 2000, and I just checked: the news entries appear to have > >> fallen off the site. > > There is a significant part to these patent enforcement stories: they all > > happen on Win32 platform. Microsoft has never enforced media patents on Linux > > market, as far as I know. > That's irrelevant if they actually own the patent: the goal is not to > avoid getting sued, it's to avoid breaking the law. Disagree. We are generally aware that, given the state of the industry today, large sections of the Debian archive are infringing on one US software patent or another. Software patents are an illegitimate application of patent law, however; we should not unnecessarily legitimize them through our obeisance. The policy that maximizes our ability to achieve our goals is one which treats software patents as non-existent, *except* in cases where there is a clear danger of litigation. (In contrast, all software actively used today would still have been covered by copyright even under the earliest copyright policies in the US; so regardless of what else may be happening on the frontiers of copyright law, the copyrights governing the software in our archive are Constitutionally legitimate, and it's right that we should respect them.) I do not have a clear feeling yet on what this policy would dictate in the case of MPlayer, however. Certainly the threat level is higher than for most patent-infringing software in our archive, but I haven't decided if menacing phone calls from Microsoft developers trip my danger threshold here. I'm inclined to say that anyone who can't get their corporate lawyer to handle such "legal relations" matters isn't serious. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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