On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 02:14:07PM -0400, Todd Berman (tberman@...) wrote:
> Honestly, giving the mplayer peoples preoccupation with the legality of
> what they are doing, if they are providing the downloading, I have no
> doubt it is completely legal.

>From their discussions in mplayer-dev-eng and mplayer-users, I can only
conclude that they are ignorant of copyright law. Here's one example
which is relevant to this thread: 

Alexey Morozov (user), <20020610032848.GX8690@...>:
... "strictly speaking codecs on mplayerhq.hu are illegal" ... "No, I
don't want to say you should remove it immediately, but probably there's
a legal problem here" 

A'rpi (dev) response <200206101054.g5AAsXO5010229@...>:
"i'm not a lawyer, but teh avifile guys discussed this topic very long,
about a year ago, and get the result of it's somehow legal. note that
you can get the win32 codecs from m$ without having to accept any
license."

This is most likely what A'rpi is referring to:
http://avifile.sourceforge.net/about.htm

"Many DLLs are available without having to accept any license agreement
at all ( DivX ;-), all DirectShow codecs ), what obviously means that
any kind of activity with them is acceptable."

The second part of that avifile statement is patently incorrect.
Copyrighted works which do not include a license are still protected by
copyright law, and redistributing said works would be copyright
infringement. 

I've mailed the legal department at Apple, Microsoft and Real and asked
if the mplayer project has distribution licenses for their codecs. I'll
inform the list of any response.
 
> I know OpenDivx (not sure if this is what divx4linux is based on or not)
> had a no binary-distribution license, but src was acceptable. Im hunting
> around on the mplayer site right now to try to find a definative answer.

divx4linux is the binary only codec from divx.com. avifile ebuild
shouldn't require it.

-- 
Jon Lech Johansen
jon@...
nanocrew.net/blog/

Stat sua cuique dies, breve et inreparabile tempus
omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis,
hoc virtutis opus.

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