[vlc] Re: patent menace

[Benjamin Pracht]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005, GALAD77 wrote :
> Hello,
> 
> I have recently seen in the web that videolan might close due to patent
> problems.
> What might be the consequences of current patent tendency?
> - Videolan will never see a new release?
> - will videolan completely close or only some modules (those that are
> patent-attacked)
> - All current videolan users will have to change to another application?
> - All current projects based on videolan will be become illegal?
> 

Well, first of all, the software patent issue not only concerns the
VideoLAN team, but more or less anybody who is willing to write sofware,
(free or not). The risk is that it might become more or less impossible
to write a single software without using tenths or hundreds of patented
features. That means that everybody that has not enough money to pay
royalties, or enough patents itself to negociate with other patent
holders won't be able to write software anymore. This is particularly
a sensitive issue in the case of video related softwares, since codecs
tend to be a kind of higly patented field.

So, yes, the consequences could be that there could not be any new
release of videolan, that we may have to stop distributing the curent
releases, that using videolan might become illegal. In fact, most of
VLC's features are already subjected to petents in the USA and in
Europe. The recent issue with DTS (VLC doesn't include a DTS decoder
anymore since v0.8.0, because of a patent related problem) is an
illustration that this is a real issue However, remember, it is not only
VideoLAN that is threatened, it is the whole software industry that will
suffer of such a measure, and free sofware first.

You should really have a look at the links given on
http://www.videolan.org/patents.html if you're interested.


-- 
BigBen

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