Re: Policy on code covered by patents but not compiled?
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>If the world's largest online encyclopedia can manage using only free
>codecs for its media
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Media_help), then you can too.
Um, you didn't actually read my message, did you?
Since your reply was totally orthogonal to my question.
I don't want to encourage anyone to use MPEG encoders; I want to make life
easier for the Debian packagers of software which contains MPEG encoders
upstream. I'm suggesting not compiling them, disabling them, and generally
making them uninstallable and hard to use (if usable at all). They might be
useful for people studying encoding techniques, but they wouldn't be
immediately usable as encoders by anyone installing the Debian package.
We have lots of upstream tarballs which are full of crap, and not having to
repack them to remove the crap is a good thing. Do you know anything about
the way Debian packaging works? There are virtues to having the "upstream
tarball" actually be the upstream tarball, even if it's full of junk which we
have no plans to compile or use.
>So, even if there were some loophole that made it okay to merely
>facilitate the commission of a crime rather than commit it directly,
You just begged the question and prejudged the case. The question was
whether the courts are *stupid enough* to think that this sort of action would
constitute a patent infringement or encouragement of a patent infringement.
It shouldn't by any sane legal standard, but the law is not always sane.
I await helpful replies.
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