Wording of Legal Issues myth

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

I'm in favor of this change.  Go ahead and make it.

And no, pointing out that it's possible to infringe does not count in any 
way as contributory infringement.

We worry more about something like this: "for lots of great software, go 
to THIS COOL SITE."  Which *is* contributory infringement, if we know that 
THIS COOL SITE has infringing code.

--g

_____________________  ____________________________________________
  Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have
 Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent.  the
             Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the 
                     ] [ dumb.  --mcluhan

On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> I read the Fedora Myths page today and thought the legal issues entry
> was a bit on the conservative side.  I'd like to see it be a little more
> explicit about the situation:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraMyths#head-37a0662e90f2aaad2607986eb8fad7b80da09982
> 
> I would like to change this paragraph:
>   For example, Fedora includes several media players that support a wide
>   range of formats, but not does not supply plug-ins for media formats 
>   that are restricted by patent licenses or legislation. 
> 
> To this:
>   For example, Fedora includes several media players that support a
>   wide range of free and open formats but none that depend on formats
>   that are restricted by patent licenses or legislation.  The Fedora
>   project realizes that many of our users are legally allowed to use
>   these proprietary codecs so we package media players that are
>   extensible via plugins.  This allows third parties that are legally
>   allowed to distribute the codecs to make them available as plugin
>   packages that will work with our media players.
> 
> Does this cross the line to contributory infringement?  It doesn't
> mention any specific places a person can download from.  It covers users
> granted licenses by the owning companies as well as users in countries
> where the patents are not valid.  It doesn't encourage anyone to do
> anything that is illegal; only points out that plugin packages are
> available on the internet for those who have a right to use them.
> 
> -Toshio
>