On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 07:10:59PM +0100, Matthew William Solloway Bell wrote: > Justification: Policy 2.3 - Copyright considerations This has nothing to do with copyright. This is a question of patent infringement. Please do not conflate these two areas of law. > This package includes libfaad* and libx264* which implement the MPEG-4 > Advanced Audio Coding and Advanced Video Coding. Unfortunately, these > are patent encumbered in at least the USA, and many other countries. To > distribute code implementing any of these patents, a license is > required[1]. This license requires signing an agreement and the payment > of royalties, which hasn't been done AFAIK, and is contrary to policy. > There has been some discussion on the lists about this issue with no > particular conclusion[2]. > Should I forward this to FTP Masters and/or Debian Legal? You should stop filing multiple release critical bug reports for a legal issue on which there is no conclusion. Take this to debian-legal *first*, and if there is agreement that these packages cannot be distributed by Debian, *then* file bugs. It is Debian's de facto policy that software patents are only an obstacle to inclusion in main if there is both a history of enforcement and a reasonable belief that the patents are not invalidated by prior art. Please demonstrate that this is the case for patents covering use of these codecs. Note that the existence of voluntary licensees is evidence of neither enforcement nor validity. > It is therefore my conclusion that these libraries are not distributable > by Debian. Subject to confirmation of this conclusion, the libraries > must be removed from the archive. A conclusion for which you have provided no support whatsoever. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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