Thank you for the background info, I appreciate your time.

-S

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of Bill
Jonas
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 7:41 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: media won't play on RH8


On Sat, Apr 03, 2004 at 07:12:06PM -0700, Wagner, Steven G wrote:
> I was surprised that a distro like RH8 wouldn't play my music and videos
> right away.

Not sure about some of the video issues (I'm not generally a Red Hat
user), but the MP3 issue is due to patents.

To make a long story short, Fraunhofer[1] pulled a Unisys -- they let
anybody and everybody use MP3 without saying anything so that it would
become popular and entrenched, and then they pointed out that they have
patents on it and announced that they would charge licensing fees[2] for
use of it.  So most free-downloadable distributions no longer have
out-of-the-box support for MP3, because it would obviously make no sense
to pay royalties to some other company for something they're giving away
for free.

The individual developer probably feels he's safe, since it's unlikely
that Fraunhofer would come after him, since he has shallow pockets and
it would be bad PR, which is why you can download drop-in packages for
these distributions.

(Technically, they didn't change the licensing fee structure so much as
they just hadn't really said too awfully much about it before.)

[1] http://www.fraunhofer.de/english/
[2] http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your front door.  You step
into the Road,  and if you don't keep your feet,  there  is  no knowing
where you might be swept off to."  --  Bilbo Baggins

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