Patent licenses for ubuntu

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Reinhard,

Reinhard Tartler [2010-04-21 12:51 +0200]:
> My question here is: What effects does canonical's patent licenses have
> on the redistribution terms of the packages 'ffmpeg', 'mplayer', 'lame',
> 'faad' and 'faac'?
> 
> In case that canonical has indeed purchased patent licenses for MPEG2,
> VC1, MPEG4 visual and AVC, and this is the reason why ubuntu is able to
> redistribute the packages mentioned above, what effects does this have
> on ubuntu's downstreams? Are they required to obtain a patent license
> themselves? How expensive would such licenses be for them?

As we suspected, these do not affect the Ubuntu distribution or its
derivatives at all.

The official statement from Canonical's legal department, from Amanda
Brock:

----------------- 8< -------------------
Canonical has purchased some patent licences for CODECs for limited
OEM use.  So, while it's true that Canonical is a licensee of various
codec patents, these are used in connection with custom versions of
Ubuntu for OEMs.  The licenses require payment of royalties, and
Canonical charges its OEMs fees to cover these expenses.

These licenses have no effect on the redistribution (licence) terms of 
packages which are not delivered through Canonical's OEMs, and Canonical 
isn't granting any patent licenses with respect to generally available 
downloads.  Packages such as 'ffmpeg', 'mplayer', 'lame', 'faad' and 
'faac' are licensed under the terms of their upstream licensor, and 
Canonical is neither adding nor removing any end user rights to those 
packages.

Canonical is not accepting any risk of patent infringement associated 
with third party open source packages.

If a downstream user wishes to obtain codecs for which patent royalties 
have been paid, the user may purchase a Fluendo product from the
Canonical store: http://shop.canonical.com/index.php?cPath=19
----------------- 8< -------------------

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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