twolame - legal

[Julian Leyh]

2012/8/17 Nikos Roussos <comzeradd at fedoraproject.org>:
> On Thu, 2012-08-16 at 09:47 -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:
>
> On 08/16/2012 05:27 AM, Nikos Roussos wrote:
>> I happened to notice that twolame is currently on rpmfusion. Is there a
>> legal reason for that?
>>
>> twolame is an MP2 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer II) encoder (not mp3), which seems
>> to be a free (as free of patents) codec. There was a similar discussion
>> on Debian and they concluded that it's ok to have it on the official
>> repos.
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=419597
>
> Unfortunately, yes, this is legally blocked in Fedora at this time.
>
> Yes, I assumed so. I'm mostly asking why, because it seems that there is no
> patent infringement issue with twolame.

I fail to see the reason, too, since the license is perfectly okay
(LGPLv2+), and the patent covering MPEG-1 Layer 2 expired in 2003. But
then, I'm no lawyer either.