On Sat, Jan 08, 2000 at 12:31:44PM +0100, Jordi Mallach wrote:
> The other day I was wondering why there aren't any Mp3 encoders in the
> distribution. Is there any law that prevents us from including them?
Some idiots in a few of the world's governments have made the decision to
allow patenting of algorithms. The owner of the mp3 patent in the US and
in Germany has been lawsuit-happy over the technology and while there is
plenty of prior art for the technology, nobody with the money to fight
this in court has decided to fight this patent.
I still don't see why mp3 players could not be packaged into non-us, but
hey, if I can't package mp3 encoders, I know where to get the source.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian Linux developer
http://tank.debian.net GnuPG key pub 1024D/DCF9DAB3 sub 2048g/3F9C2A43
http://www.debian.org 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3
2.3.1 has been released. Folks new to this game should remember that
2.3.* releases are development kernels, with no guarantees that they
will not cause your system to do horrible things like corrupt its
disks, catch fire, or start running Mindcraft benchmarks.
-- Slashdot
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