Fedora's way forward

[Peter Jones]

On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 10:57 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com>:
> > On 3/28/06, Alan Cox <alan at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > I suggest you consult lawyers. Frauenhofer have claimed player royalties
> > > and quite actively.
> > 
> > Other than to talk to a lawyer, which is always the authorative action
> > to take on any issues involving questions of legal risk.... is there
> > any instructive references that could be cited in layperson oriented
> > documentation as to why mp3 playback support isn't included?
> 
> Yes, I'd like to see an authoritative source for Alan's assertion.

They're not exactly keeping it a big secret.  Which is to say that sent
a lot of nice little legal letters several years ago, sued some people,
and put up a website about how to pay for licenses.

> I did quite a bit of web research before making my statement.  If
> Fraunhofer has made claims on decoders, this fact is unknown (or not
> disclosed) by any of the major decoder implementors.

Amazingly, if you google for "mp3 licensing", the first hit is:

mp3licensing.com - Home
Details of the MP3 licensing programs for Thomson Multimedia and Fraunhofer IIS-A.
www.mp3licensing.com/ - 7k - Cached - Similar pages

Even more shocking, this page has license terms and price quotes for
both encoders and decoders.

The reason the authors of decoders don't mention it is because they
don't have much money.  It sounds cynical, but that's really how things
are.  The licensing writes for mp3 are controlled by Thomson Multimedia.
Thomson's no spring chicken, they're big business.  You've heard of
their brand names -- Technicolor, RCA, and others.  They're in it for
the money, and the money is not in suing individuals who happened to
write a codec illegally.  The money is in vendors who actually have
large amounts of money with which to pay damages.

-- 
  Peter