However, there could and should be way more support of being legal in Ubuntu. The notice: “May be illegal in your country” is a very bad way of doing things.

It is not so hard to generate a database about the legal states of the media codecs in different jurisdictions. And the user is giving her location during system installation. So it is relatively easy to provide the accurate information about the legal state of a particular codec. And therefore it is also relative easy to give easily followable legal ways to users in jurisdictions where patents are in effect. (This could even push Canonicals’ sales of the Fluendo Codec Pack – because there are many-many users who does not want to break the law intently.)

When I say relative easy I mean relative easy for a small group of people willing to do it. It could be finished in a month.

Thanks Very Much Fluendo, jackc….

I do understand the concept, and how the corporations expect it to work. A Codec license must be paid, there is a cheaper one for playback and a expensive one for encoding. You can pay either a huge annual unlimited copies fee, or per copy basis. The software itself does not infringe this, it is you as individual living in one of those oppressed regimes who do, the moment you decide to play or encode. Doesn’t matter if you made your own player/encoder or used someone else’s.

Usually large corporations like Microsoft pay the annual license fee and provide you the software already paid. A free software effort like LAME can’t do this for you, instead you can try arrange an agreement with the patent holder (in the mp3 case, that would be Thompson). Now do this with each and every codec… Most won’t let individuals any sort of pay agreement, and will only talk with other companies for bulk licensing.

I think Fluendo, being smaller goes the per-copy payment, and playback only. Remember you are not paying for the software but for the license to playback that codec, so in theory you could still use ugly, VLC or mplayer (for playback, and only the codecs covered by Fluendo) legally after purchasing; but since those large corporations dictate and change laws at will YMMV.

Many parts of the world will simply never accept software patents and can simply ignore this, but attention must be paid if you hear any sort of “Free Trade Agreement” going on as the States never sign agreements without forcing local law changes to enforce theirs over yours!

The Symbian decision is a good point to raise. I think it was a bad decision, as a result of an overly lax interpretation of the rules, which viewed it not as a patent on a piece of software as such, but as being in the grey area between software and the operation of a computer as a computer.

In any case, it shouldn’t worry people looking for codecs, as patents have never been granted on them.

“United Kingdom law does not allow the patenting of software”

Read the Symbian decision, it was about a DLL loaded in a phone that was consuming less battery.

The judge said that a better piece of code was patentable if it was reducing power consumption.

United Kingdom law does not allow the patenting of software, so it isn’t an issue, as there are no patents to violate. I’m not certain about the other countries, but I was under the impression that the US and Japan are the only countries in which software is generally patentable.