You make much confusion between the copyright law (being a Free software is a
question that relates to this law), the patent law (the audio/video formats
you mention are covered by many software patents and that is the problem they
raise) and, in another thread, the trademark law (whose objective is to be
able to identify a product). These laws have nothing in common.
To respond to your post: H.264, AAC, and MP3 are formats covered by software
patents what raises risks in their implementation/use in some countries (like
the USA or Japan where software patents are authorized, unlike the European
Union, China, India or Brazil where, fortunately, they are illegal). There
are Free (as in freedom) codecs for these formats and Trisquel ships them (a
lot of them by default as far as I remember). VLC contains some. FFMPEG too.
They are free softwares anyway (a concept that has, one more time, nothing to
do with the patent law).
Notice that, by their very nature, software patents are infringed by
virtually any piece of software. They only are harmful to innovation and
should not exist.
