[MPlayer-users] MPlayer patent issues NOVIRUS

[Guillaume POIRIER]

Hello,

On 6/10/05, Richard.Petrie at trendcomms.com <Richard.Petrie at trendcomms.com> wrote:
>  
> Hi, 
> can anyone clarify for me what the actual patent threat is that may prevent
> MPlayer continuing. I know about the European software patent situation but
> I do not understand why this threatens the existence of MPlayer. 

The way I understand it, pretty much all video processing techniques
are patented (or if they are not, they will... or they may also not be
be worth being patented).

Now, given the fact that MPlayer, FFmpeg and all projects rotating
around them, deal with multimedia en/de-coding, you can imagine that
it will be pretty simple to sue/threaten those projects for patent
violation.

Off course, none of us would like that to happend, that's why we don't
like the idea of patents.

Guillaume
-- 
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