Hi: Ok, hang on a sec. Lets be clear on our terminology before we have a serious missunderstanding. I've seen three terms that are not related used as if they were. 1. GPL. This is a software license. It's a form of copyright for a specific piece of code. Code released under the GPL may be modified and redistributed providing those rights are maintained ... bla bla bla. You know the drill. 2. Open standards. An open standard is a standard which is open (i.e. the opposite of a closed standard). The specification is available and not a trade secret. Open standards are often, but definitely not always, the product of some collaborative effort. Using this definition, MP3 is an open standard. However, at least some feel that open standards need to be royalty free (see the URL for "Open Standards: Principles and Practice" below). 3. Patent. a patent, as I understand it, is recognision that a particular invention etc is yours. Paraphrasing a definition in "What Are Patents, Trademarks, Servicemarks, and Copyrights?" (see below), a patent gives you the right to stop others from making, using, celling or importing your invention. The idea of patents were that this meant an inventor could share their invention with the public whilst having a period of time in which they could have the exclusive rights to the use of this invention or could determine who else could use it. OK, so where does MP3 fit into all this? Well, before we can look at that, we have to look at software patents. Software patents are explored in some detail in several documents listed below, but basically they're a legal construct that's basically impractical and unworkable. Patents can of course be challenged, but instead of patent offices looking thoroughly to see if a patent is genuine *before* issuing it, they issue it anyway and say that the validity of such a patent can be tested in a court of law. The trouble with this is that, to test it, you need a nice fat wod of cash to throw at the problem. The Amazon article points out that clearly unreasonable patents have been granted and stand because of this. A software patent relating to MP3 is likely to be far less clear cut. OK, now to get back to the three terms and how they relate to MP3. You can write code and release it under the GPL, regardless of the status of the standards it implements, well at least in theory. In practice, however, I'd think that a programme documenting a trade secret would probably get you into hot water pretty fast (the DVD stuff is probably a good example of this). A programme released under the GPL or any other opensource model that documents a freely available standard is not going to tell you anything more about the standard than you can glean from reading the standard anyway, so there's no problem with it. But, and here's the clincher. A program released under the GPL that implements a freely available standard specification DOES NOT come with a licence to use that standard if the technology is patented. It is not for the program author to assign the right to use patented technologies, it's the sole right of the patent holder. so it's legal for me to read or write the LAME source code, it's legal for me to download it, but it's illegal (at least in some countries) for me to use it to encode anything. The stupidity of this is pretty obvious. It's like saying, "You can build your own car to industry standard specifications, but you can't drive it anywhere. You can only drive the cars we sell or if you pay a fee to drive your own". The problem that Redhat faces is that RPM's are generally compiled binaries. Since the only use of a compiled binary is to run it, it's not considered legally safe to distribute binary versions of MP3 software that has not been licensed by Tomson Multimedia. Vorbis is patent free and royalty free, with a fully documented standard. So people are able to use it without charge or permission. They can write both closed source and open source implementations. A little light reading: What is a standard? http://www.lib.umich.edu/ummu/standards/whatis.html Open Standards: Principles and Practice http://perens.com/OpenStandards/ Why open standards are a myth - Tech News - CNET.com http://news.com.com/news/0-1005-201-345513-0.html What Are Patents, Trademarks, Servicemarks, and Copyrights? http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/whatis.htm League for Programming Freedom - Against Software Patents http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/against-software-patents.html The Evitability of Software Patents http://www.computer.org/computer/articles/March/perspectives300.htm Stop typing amazon.com. Start typing noamazon.com. http://www.noamazon.com/faq.html Patents and MP3 http://www.mp3-tech.org/patents.html FAQ: MPEG, Patents, and Audio Coding http://sound.media.mit.edu/%7Eeds/mpeg-patents-faq Thomson Multimedia's MP3 licensing site http://www.mp3licensing.com/ google rocks! Geoff.
