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