Question on legalities

Jan Claeys lists at janc.be
Wed Jan 13 18:07:40 GMT 2010


Op woensdag 06-01-2010 om 19:33 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Martin
Owens:
> It really does depend on what codecs and extras.

Right.

> For all of the totem plugins, you should be fine. Those plugins aren't
> illegal in any way, anywhere in the world. There is just a legal grey
> area about weather or not that Free Software, maybe, possibly, could be
> covered by patents which maybe, possibly be attractive to the owners to
> sue over. Even then it's a civil case matter, not a criminal one.

It's not like patent violation is legal in most countries, so there
certainly might be some issues.  Only somebody with local legal
education/experience can know what applies.

> For w32codecs and ms-corefonts, that's illegal. It's copyright
> infringement if you start dishing them out.

Actually, msttcorefonts is 100% legal (while w32codecs is 100% illegal
in most countries).

> I think you can ship the flash player deb, but you'll also need to get
> the flash player binary that the deb downloads. Check the licensing
> agreement to see if you can redistribute.

You can only distribute the flash plugin if you have an agreement with
Adobe, and AFAIK they almost never agree on re-distribution policies, so
this might be difficult.


-- 
Jan Claeys




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