> Tell me where on this page: > > http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html > > ...you find where it says "royalty-free distribution of free decoders."
What makes you think you need to agree to those royalties for a *decoder*? Those royalties are for a series of patents that seem to apply to encoders, not decoders. You can find a listing in: http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html My understanding is that you only need to license this patents if you distribute an *encoder*. If you need to license those patents, you also have to agree to some per-decoder fee, but that doesn't mean you need to license them for a decoder. This has been througly discussed in debian-legal and other mailing lists. > If you find that magic phrase, let me know and we'll drop mp3 > support into Fedora Core tomorrow. :) I believe you should do that. Debian, after discussing the legal status of doing so, has decided to include MP3 *decoding* support (not *encoding*) and there are many free software decoders around, whose authors have never licensed any of Thomson patents. It seems this was discussed in Slashdot at some point in 2003 when a report claimed it wasn't legally allowed to distribute free decoders anymore. At this point many distributions decided to drop MP3 support. However, it seems this report was bogus, as reported in: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/30321 I hope this helps. Alejo. http://azul.freaks-unidos.net/ ---=( Comunidad de Usuarios de Software Libre en Colombia )=--- ---=( http://bachue.com/colibri )=--=( [EMAIL PROTECTED] )=---
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