On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 23:28 -0600, Andrew Konosky wrote: > I've read some places and heard myths that, at least for US citizens > such as myself, that a lot of the stuff we download is "illegal" > because > someone isn't making money off of us. A good example is with mp3 > coders. > Now downloading mp3 songs is a completely separate issue, but in the > US, > someone has a copyright on the mp3 technology, so that is why > RedHat/Fedora can't ship with mp3 support, or they would have to pay > big > $ in either legal penatlies or royalties. When I downloaded one of > the > many mp3 encoders to rip my CD collection, I remember seeing a > warning > on the website saying it "might" be illegal for US citizens to > download > the file because it is copyrighted here. The mp3 technology (as I see discussed later in the thread) is protected by patent, not copyright. See http://www.mp3licensing.com/ The mp3 files (or DVD movies, etc.) are (or at least may be) protected by copyright, but this does not legally prevent the one who has bought a CD from making archival copies, or playing the material from different media. If content now distributed in mp3 files were instead encoded with an open (and arguably higher quality) process such as Ogg Vorbis, all of us open-source users would be a whole lot happier and safer from both copyright and patent issues. Phil Phil
