Romain Beauxis schrieb: > This always the same story.. > Patents are registered 'a priori', and owning a patent does not implies that > it is justified in any ways. Patents must be treated as a threat, not a legal > binding that will enforced by the law.
Patents that were granted are a valid basis upon which companies can sue companies and projects. They're dangerous until a court denies that special patent claim. "Violating" a patent is not enough to get you in real trouble (law suits and all), the entity holding the patent in question has to sue you. That may or may not hit you. However, in case of MPEG the patent holders *are* collecting the license fees - and of course they sue if you distribute "their" coding methods without having a license. If you ship more than 50.000 decoders (easily bypassed by some Linux distributions) they'll charge you 0.25$ per decoder. If you happen to ship more than 50.000 encoders: Again, 0.25$. They even charge for encoded content. ( Taken from http://www.mpegla.com/m4v/m4vweb.ppt ) To put it into a nutshell: MPEG4 is *not* free, it's completely non-free. Personally I think that's reason enough to avoid it wherever possible. I don't think something essential as the Web should slip into dependency of non-free formats. I don't see how Debian could ship a MPEG-enabled browser in its default installation. If somehow possible the WHATWG should adopt a free format and I think it's in the best interest of Debian to bringing this to the WHATWG's attention. Maik Merten -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
