Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 13:28:43 -0400 From: Jason Andresen <jandrese@mitre.org> To: Dirk Froemberg <dirk@freebsd.org> Cc: Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net>, ports@freebsd.org, multimedia@freebsd.org, cpiazza@freebsd.org, dburr@freebsd.org, demon@freebsd.org, esk@ira.uka.de, greid@ukug.uk.freebsd.org, knu@freebsd.org, leo@florida.sarang.net, markp@freebsd.org, nakai@freebsd.org, patrick@freebsd.org, petef@freebsd.org, vanilla@freebsd.org, yar@freebsd.org Subject: Re: RFC: mark MP3 encoders, editors, and players RESTRICTED Message-ID: <3D6D084B.58E75777@mitre.org> References: <20020828014959.G90781-100000@blues.jpj.net> <20020828165625.GA15609@physik.TU-Berlin.DE>
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Dirk Froemberg wrote: > > Hi! > > On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 01:58:53AM -0400, Trevor Johnson wrote: > > The Fraunhofer Institute seems to have discontinued the exception it was > > making for free software. > > AFAIK nothing really has changed recently in regard to the licensing > policies of Thomson. The changes the slashdot article is referring > to happened about one and a half year ago. > > The ports you made changes to fall in three categories: > > - mp3 utilities (like easytag, cd2mp3, ...) > - mp3 decoders > - mp3 encoders > > The first category isn't subject of the license anyway. The second > category shouldn't be a problem. No single step has been taken to > get any license fee for mp3 decoders yet. Probably the only category > having a problem is the last one. The FHI (Frauenhofer Institut) > seems to insist on the license here. > > Anyway, IMHO we don't have a real legal problem here. But perhaps > your motivation was a political one (let's stop mp3 in favour of > ogg 8-)... Actually, I think the license was changed to include the decoders as well as the encoders. MP3 utilities are naturally exempt unless they actually decode (or encode) the mp3 data. The licensed decoders is a big deal though, a _huge_ amount of software uses mp3 audio these days. Switching to .ogg would solve a lot of these problems and more importantly, would get us out from under Frauenhoffers sword. At the rate they're going at, it will only be a few months before Frauenhoffer is charging per decode or worse. -- \ |_ _|__ __|_ \ __| Jason Andresen jandrese@mitre.org |\/ | | | / _| Network and Distributed Systems Engineer _| _|___| _| _|_\___| Office: 703-883-7755 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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