On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 12:44 +0800, John Summerfield wrote: > On Wednesday 01 December 2004 10:58, Scott Talbot wrote: > > Not to start a war, but AFAIK, DMCA has only been used to stop a > > company from distributing a software that would copy DVD's (that was > > it's intended purpose). > > Wasn't there a Swede named Johanson or similar who got dudded over this? His > software had legal uses but could also be used illegally. > Yes "DVD Jon" was eventually cleared of wrong doing under Swedish law, DVD XCOPY which used his libraries, has been removed from sale, and the company was bankrupted with lawsuits from the MPAA. > > The reason Red Hat won't include a DVD player is the same as the > > reason they don't ship an MP3 player, i.e. the formats are not open source. > > This is the stated purpose of Fedora, to put together a Distro of > > completely Open source products. > > I b'lieve he problem with mp3 is patents. Altogether a different animal. > Well I don't see much difference, If an item has patents, it is presumably not free. Even though the patent holders have never even tried to start legal action on mp3 codecs anywhere, and have said that they have no intention of going after anyone, they also have not released them under GPL or any other "free" license. The fedora home page does have this to say on the subject though: "The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software." Since mp3 is not free, redhat won't use it. Presumably this would also apply to code that is copyrighted, but not patented too. Scott > -- > > Cheers > John Summerfield > tourist pics: http://environmental.disaster.cds.merseine.nu/ >
