Re: mpeg4 and other proprietary formats

["Matthew Gillen" <user=50@nabble.blu.org>]

 jbk wrote: 
> Yes, but in my original post I noted that that is what I already do for 
> downloaded media that I keep. And I discovered that I already have 
> installed the above named interpreters. I was under the impression that 
> I could not even do that in F8 any longer. 

F8 isn't any better or worse than F7 in that regard.  Same policy as 
they've always had.  They haven't made it any harder to do what you did 
with F6 or F7, but what you were doing with those may have been illegal. 
  All they did with F8, as Chris mentioned, is to make it easier for you 
get the codecs legally. 

> So help me with the logic here. 
> Redhat and some other distributions will not include in their base 
> distributions the codecs for interpreting proprietary formats and now 
> point you to a for pay licensing entity for these interpreters. 

Well, you can get them for free, but the legality in the US is highly 
questionable. 

> But, can you get a license for libdvdcss, the most commonly used 
> interpreter? 

I don't know, I haven't checked. 

> Most personally owned video cameras use proprietary 
> codecs only available for another OS. Buying a license to view what I 
> already own does not seem legitimate. 

Unfortunately, that's the way patents and licensing work in this 
country, and this is precisely why Fedora and others are trying to 
promote license-free codecs (ie ogg/theora). 

Think of it this way: you buy a DVD, but then you also have to buy a DVD 
player to actually watch it on your TV.  The fact that bundled into that 
DVD player cost are licenses for the codecs that any DVD might use 
doesn't seem to bother anyone.  The costs for the licenses that the DVD 
Player manufacturer gets are "low" (relatively speaking) because it's 
assumed that no one who buys that Player will be able to use those 
codecs outside that device. 

M$, Apple, and Real (as in RealPlayer), all give away their media 
players, but they have paid licensing fees to a bunch of people to get 
redistribution rights.  They all craft their EULA so that it sounds like 
using the codec libraries that M$ paid for outside of their media-player 
is as much stealing as it would be to steal a physical DVD player.  I'm 
not certain that those EULAs have teeth, but I'm also not certain that 
they don't. 

But the point is, Fedora and Debian (as specific examples) want to only 
include software that has full redistribution rights (ie a derivative 
distro could use without restriction).  If Fedora or Debian paid the 
licensing fees so that they could distribute the codecs, that license 
would not be transferable to derivative distros.  So they don't do that. 

Matt 

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