On Tue, Oct 26, 1999 at 12:12:20AM -0400, Greg Maxwell wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Nils Faerber wrote:
> > I cannot agree.
> > Not to know you are doing something wrong does not make it right either.
> > That is just a bad excuse.
> It is not wrong!
OK, that might be true for the US (see following text).
> Dont get me rolling. Nothing involved in lame should be patentable.
I fully agree but we have this damn patent from FhG IIS and have two
choices:
1. We try to ignore it until someone gets caught.
2. We try to find a legal way to distribute and use Lame.
> Furthermore, even if violating some patent is illegial it is NOT immoral
> (which the word wrong above implies).
Again agreement. I think thta patent laws in the US are rediculous! Did you
hear about that case where a man came to a doctor with some strange desease.
The doctor sent a blood sample to a company which then found a gene defect
in this man's blood and then patented his desease? After that the man tried
to claim the rights on his desease for himself and lost!
> In recent years patent law as been extended in extreme ways. I feel these
> extensions against the good of the people in general, and even most
> bussinesses, really only the lawers profit. It is my belief that altering
> my course of behavior to suit some law I strongly disagree with is
> absoultly immoral. I feel that following a law against your self-intrests
> is a sign of acceptance.
But lawyers and states are much more powerful than a single free software
developing individual. We cannot change the law by ignoring it in the case
of Lame.
We should come to a decision with what to do with Lame first. The second
thing to do is to support the FSF in fighting against software patents which
they are already doing.
> To further complicate things, US law states that you legally can not have
> ANY understanding of a patent unless you are a patent lawyer.
Ooops!
Nice niche ;)
That would be the same kind of trick used to distribute Lame legally: Just
distribute the patch not the whole encoder. So for the us we all claim not
to have ANY understanding of patents and patent laws ;)
But what if a patent lawyer tells you?
CU
nils
--
Nils Faerber (Linux Nils) eMail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Student of computer science http://www.si.unix-ag.org/~nils/
Unix user group, University of Siegen, Germany
Siegen ... the arctic rain forest!
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