Re: Question about patents

Hi.

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:51 AM, David Woodfall <[email protected]> wrote:
> I expect this has been asked a 1000 times before, but I just want to
> clear up the issue of patents and storage of source code/binaries.

I have no legal knowledge. In fact, what I am saying here is basically
stuff that I'm parroting from the internet, but:

* *IF* there are real patents (I don't know if others in the team are
knowledgeable enough about the issues), then, they are likely to be
expired or expiring soon (unless if they happen to be extended).

* It seems that the jurisdiction varies a lot between the US (not
really sure about Canada) and other countries in the world.

> We have a website currently hosted in Canada, although the domain is
> registered/owned by me, a UK citizen.
>
> Is it legal for us to host binary packages of lame on our site? I
> gather that source + build scripts are OK, but perhaps someone can
> illuminate this a bit more for me, as reading through all the info on
> this it's so complicated my eyes are beginning to glaze over...
>
> But I have noticed that Debian have binaries (or at least someone at
> RareWares does) and there are also RPMs around.

Yes, I was present in Debian's DebConf 10 and I talked with other
people in the multimedia team. The day after I arrived, the LAME
package was uploaded, but it only entered Debian proper after the FTP
Master (essentially the legal gatekeeper of the archive) gave the
green light and other packages also entered Debian (including XviD and
x264).

If I remember things correctly, the multimedia encoders were accepted
after Debian got some legal advice on patents. The advice is here:

http://www.debian.org/legal/patent
http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

I also worked a bit on getting Handbrake included in Debian's
experimental (Handbrake's build system assumes that embedded libraries
will be used, instead of using the libraries already available in the
system).

> Any assistance hugely appreciated.

I hope that this doesn't make things muddier.


Regards,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br

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