On Sun, 26 Oct 2003, Dag Wieers wrote: >> eh? What kind of stupidness is this? If RedHat were based in Germany there >> wouldn't be any mp3 support either! >> >> I am new to this mailing list and I havn't read the 500 other discussions on >> the topic, but I know that the DMCA is not the reason why mp3 support is not >> added to RedHat. I thought the reason was because of licensing issues >> related to mp3s, not the DMCA. > >It's a software patent issue that currently cannot be enforced >in Europe afaik. > >Besides we wouldn't be having the whole patenting issue now if >it wasn't for the US. The guidelines used by the European >commission were actually designed by the Business Software >Alliance and mostly lobbied by several US interest groups. Regardless of the kind opinions of all of the IANAL (I am not a lawyer) people out there who would like to interpret the laws of every country out there and how those laws apply to them, their country, Red Hat, or someone else, Red Hat does have a team of legal council who is very aware of the laws of the United States, Europe and other countries in the world. Red Hat legal council is very capable of knowing how to determine what is legal and what is not, and what Red Hat can legally ship in which if any countries in the world, and that includes MP3 support. The status quo of MP3 support in the current distribution as distributed throughout the world, as decided by this legal team, who _ARE_ highly skilled professional lawyers, should say something. I'm kindof surprised how so many people who are NOT lawyers seem to think they know more about worldwide intellectual property law than a team of REAL lawyers. Anyway, once again, the whole MP3 discussion leads to pointlessness because the opinions of 10's, 100's or 1000's of non-lawyers aren't going to change the fact that lawyers have decided what is and isn't legal to ship wherever, and that decision wont likely change until laws change. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
