Understanding Multimedia and Legal Issues in Linux


You can't play DVD movies or MP3 music with software delivered with Fedora or RHEL, because software needed to do so isn't included in those distributions. That's because there are patent claims associated with the formats used to store, encode, and decode that content that would prevent open source software that worked with that content from being freely distributed.

Commercial Linux vendors , including Red Hat, have decided not to add software codecs (which encode and decode multimedia formats), even if they were written from scratch and covered under the GPL, that are encumbered by contentious software patents. After Thomson and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (which control the MP3 patent) began requesting licensing fees in 2002 of $.075 for MP3 decoders (per system), Red Hat Linux dropped MP3 support. (See www.mp3licensing.com/royalty for details.)

Just to clarify, I am not talking about copyright here. Nobody can rightly claim that it is okay to copy someone else's commercial code and release it as free software. It would clearly violate copyright laws. What we are talking about are patents.

The idea of a patent is to allow someone to control the rights regarding who could make, sell, offer to sell, use, or import an invention that the patent applicant dreamed up. As it relates to multimedia software in particular, the encoding and decoding of audio and video content for many commercially released music and video formats are covered by patents. So, even if open source developers write every piece of code from scratch to encode and decode content, it may not be legal to distribute it without paying a royalty to the patent owner.

There are major efforts underway ( especially in Europe) to oppose software patents. Refer to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure Web site ( http://ffii.org ) for further information. The contention is that so many ideas related to software are being patented that it could severely cripple the ability to innovate (especially for open source developers or small software companies without huge legal teams ). Patents have been granted in Europe for common items that might appear on a Web page, such as selling things over a network, using an electronic shopping cart, and using rebate codes (see http://webshop.ffii.org ).

Despite efforts against software patents, however, the fact remains that Red Hat Linux distributions do not include some of the software that you would want to use to play your digital media. In each major area of multimedia in this chapter, I'll describe which codecs and players are included with Fedora and RHEL, which ones are not included, and the risks you assume by getting that software on your own.




Fedora 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible
Fedora 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible
ISBN: 047008278X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 279

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