On Wednesday 12 July 2006 12:45 pm, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote: > > Forget about RMS. Thomson which holds the rights to the > > fraunhoffer institute patents for MP3 could go after u. > > Then they would be going after a number of other GNU packages too. > > > http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/ to count your potential > > liability. Completely RAND u know. > > Do not take licensing and patent issues lightly. They can impair > > your life. Especially since the closed software companies are > > scrapping the barrel bottom for ideas and money. > > I know that. That is why I asked the GNU people.
Oh. Did i miss something?. I hought u were doing something with mp3encoding/decoding. > But, there are > many GNU packages which are flaunting MP3 support. Is this not > strange? Very risky and inviting trouble. > Moreover these patents are very strangely worded. eg., the > LZW and GIF patents prohobit you from making programs that encode > pictures in GIF, but there is no restriction on decoding them; I > heard although MP3 is patented the ID3 tags are not. In fact my > only requirement is reading the tags. > > Now dont claim that you know more about patents than Dr. Richard M. > Stallman, and Prof. Eben Moglen put together. > Jeez no. Just take a legal opinion if u have to decode or encod an mp3 file. FSF's legal dept.'s opinion would be good enough i suppose. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
