[MPlayer-users] MPlayer patent issues NOVIRUS

[Attila Kinali]

Hi,

First of all, please read http://www.river.com/users/share/etiquette/edit.html
Especialy the part about Full Quote and HTML. Thanks


On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:49:59 +0100
Richard.Petrie at trendcomms.com wrote:

> Trying to understand the Media player specific concern further, 
> if I purchase a license for  the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio and 
> the same for MPEG-4 then does this cover me or is this only part 
> of the story?

It's the part with the most money involved, but only a very
small part. There are litteraly thousands of patents only
in the video coding field. An equal amount exist for audio
codecs. Not to mention all the video/audio processing MPlayer
has. Not even to mention all the trivial patents that patent
things like a for loop.

To recap this: it is not possible for a single person
to pay all fees for all patents that would apply on MPlayer.
(i'd even say it's impossible to find out which ones apply)

There is a reason why we say that software patents are a bad
thing. 

And even if you payed all patent fees, there are things
that you cannot even get your hands on, because $company
desided that an OSS version of their patent is bad and
thus should be prosecuted (have a look at the libdts/libdca
case if you want to know what i mean).

Software patents are a big thread! Not only to OSS but
to all not-billion-dollar software companies.
Unfortunately, it's advantegous for the really big companies,
thus there is a lot of money floating around to promote them.


				Attila Kinali


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