[MPlayer-dev-eng] FFII software patent demo, politics, KiSS

[Tuukka Toivonen]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Enrico Weigelt wrote:

>btw: if this maillist has an archive, it also infringes some patents ...

I don't think so. As far as I understand (Finnish law), patents prohibit
only _commercial usage of patented inventions_. This should not only exclude all
non-commercial usage, but also all descriptions of the inventions. And
discussions and even code is nothing else but description, it can't violate
patents any more than MPEG-4 standard violates patents by describing
(partially in pseudocode) patented methods.

Of course, nobody wants to test this in court being afraid that court
considers a computer program a device instead of algorithm description and
that even distributing freely free software would be "commercial" since it
might decrease sales of commercial companies.

I'm not sure how exactly the proposed software patents change what is
considered covered by patents (binaries or also source code or even
computer readable descriptions?).