I've gotten some legal updates that I know some people have been waiting for: libgpod/gtkpod support for newer ipods: Legal says that we can incorporate this code, it does not violate the DMCA, because it is solely for the purposes of interoperability. This means that we can go ahead and enable support for new ipods in Fedora. ***** Linking to "third party repositories": Legal says that we can link, from the Fedora website, to third party repositories, so long as no one has made a critical assessment to determine that a patent or patents cover the technology in question and no party has actually asserted their patents against the technology, we should be okay. Once we are on notice of a claim of infringement or are aware of a competent assessment that concludes infringement is likely, we would need to take the link down or run a serious risk of facing a claim for inducing infringement. Merely linking would be highly unlikely to subject us to a claim of direct infringement. I asked about MP3, and it was stated that unless we are specifically aware of the MP3 patent holders asserting a claim against the technology, we are still okay. This means that we can put a page up on the fedoraproject.org wiki, which carefully explains that there is an optional addon repository called Livna, which contains packages that for a variety of reasons, are not included in the normal Fedora repositories. We should not specify these reasons, and if someone asserted their patents against something in Livna, we would need to take the page down. We can link to Livna directly on this page. We cannot ship yum configs which enable Livna (but Livna provides these, so we don't really need to). ***** As a reminder, if you have legal issues related to Fedora, please let me know, and I'll do my best to get them resolved. Thanks, ~spot _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
