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.
The vast majority of the code in Fedora is copyrighted. The GPL relies on copyright law as its basis.
You're right about the patents though.
Paul.
