Re: Question about patents

On (31/07/13 12:28), Rogério Brito <[email protected]> put forth the proposition:
>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.

Thanks both. I don't think we'll have anything to worry about. We
certainly aren't making a profit here.

D.



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