On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 07:22 -0800, Scott Talbot wrote: > 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. > NO. Everything written is copyrighted by the author by default. Rights can be granted by licensing (such as the GPL) but copyright cannot be transferred AFAIK IANAL
