[Ffmpeg-devel] moving non-SIMD parts of libswscale to LGPL

Michael Niedermayer michaelni
Fri Nov 17 01:26:22 CET 2006


Hi

On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 08:25:37PM +0700, Roine Gustafsson wrote:
[...]
> (BTW, I think the database exception rule has led some people here to  
> believe that tables are not covered by copyright, which is not  
> necessarily true. If the data in the table can be considered a work  
> and is not just a "mere aggregation", the table is covered by  
> copyright.)

IANAL!
the first million digits of pi are not copyrightable, even if it took 
your lifetime to find them and they are certainly not mere aggregated
IANAL!

IANAL!
or for a more realistic example, assuming bill gates would write a poem
to his cat, and include that at the top of every executable every word
file and so on, and then add a check into all programs so that they
would refuse to execute or display files which didnt include this poem
IANAL!
next he would write some nasty license for this poem (like pay me 1% of
your income related to all programs which contain my poem)

do you think microsoft would win a lawsuit if some company which writes
software for MS operating systems just copied that poem without paying MS?

if you think yes, then why didnt MS try that yet?

and now to the case of any essential and unique tables needed to decode
some format, here its not even a 1% of our income its rather a "no you
cannot use these tables"

and again I am not a lawyer, ask a real one if you are scared and your
ass depends on the truth of any of that ...

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

In the past you could go to a library and read, borrow or copy any book
Today you'd get arrested for mere telling someone where the library is




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