Codec Buddy misleading.

Rui Miguel Silva Seabra rms at 1407.org
Fri Nov 9 14:26:07 UTC 2007


On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 08:06:30AM -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 03:24 +0100, Mark wrote:
> 
> > Today is my first day in Fedora 8 (like probably a lot of people) and
> > when i want to play a movie i get codec buddy which is absolutely
> > fine! But now the misleading part comes. I live in Europe. for me it's
> > not illegal to install the "gstreamer-bad-plugins" or just packages
> > that get me mpeg/xvid/divx/aac/any_codec support and yet codec buddy
> > gives me only payed options. I didn't start using fedora a few years
> > ago to start paying for codecs!
> > 
> > Now my idea to get this better is to make codec buddy location
> > specific. When you install fedora you select the country where you
> > live. If codec buddy uses that information than it can point me to the
> > right direction where i can get my codecs for free. I ujnderstand that
> > Fedora can't include those codecs in there own repositories but
> > wouldn't it be possible to make a community driven (codec) repository
> > that contains all the packages that are not allowed in the USA but are
> > in EU (probably everywhere EXCEPT the USA). Fedora at least has to
> > notify the users that paying isn't needed if you don't live in the
> > USA!!
> 
> IANAL, but the European situation is still subject to re-interpretation
> in the future, and it's certainly far more fine-grained than US v.s EU.
> in any case. I think the language could do with being clear, however
> there's only so much that can be explained in dialog box real estate.

Every patent is valid by default. You have to go to court to prove it's
a software patent, hence invalid.

This has been estimated to cost many tens of thousands of Euros to do,
so Codec Buddy is not being misleading.

You either have a patent license, or proved in court that it is an
invalid patent, other than that, you risk bein in a patent infringement
situation, which is something I believe Red Hat definitely doesn't want
to fall into.

Rui

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