DVD Player

[Jeff Vian]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 07:22 -0800, Scott Talbot wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 12:44 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> > On Wednesday 01 December 2004 10:58, Scott Talbot wrote:
> > >         Not to start a war, but AFAIK, DMCA has only been used to stop a
> > > company from distributing a software that would copy DVD's (that was
> > > it's intended purpose).
> > 
> > Wasn't there a Swede named Johanson or similar who got dudded over this? His 
> > software had legal uses but could also be used illegally.
> > 
> 	Yes "DVD Jon" was eventually cleared of wrong doing under Swedish law,
> DVD XCOPY which used his libraries, has been removed from sale, and the
> company was bankrupted with lawsuits from the MPAA. 
> 
> > >         The reason Red Hat won't include a DVD player is the same as the
> > > reason they don't ship an MP3 player, i.e. the formats are not open source.
> > > This is the stated purpose of Fedora, to put together a Distro of
> > > completely Open source products.
> > 
> > I b'lieve he problem with mp3 is patents. Altogether a different animal.
> > 
> 
> 	Well I don't see much difference, If an item has patents, it is
> presumably not free.  Even though the patent holders have never even
> tried to start legal action on mp3 codecs anywhere, and have said that
> they have no intention of going after anyone, they also have not
> released them under GPL or any other "free" license.
> 
> The fedora home page does have this to say on the subject though:
> 
> "The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to
> build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free
> software."
> 
> Since mp3 is not free, redhat won't use it.  Presumably this would also
> apply to code that is copyrighted, but not patented too.
> 
NO.  Everything written is copyrighted by the author by default.

Rights can be granted by licensing (such as the GPL) but copyright
cannot be transferred AFAIK

IANAL