Relicensing the AMR codec for inclusion in Ubuntu

[Robbie Williamson]

> I have requested from th 3GPP organization to relicense the AMR codec
> so that it can be included in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.
> They seem very interested and have requested that I fill out a
> copyright questionnaire to make a formal request. I am not a lawyer
> nor a software engineer, so I would appreciate it if people more
> qualified than I would review the document and email me the results.
> It is attached to the bug which catalyzed the idea:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg/+bug/93849 (comment #14)
>
> Thanks. If you know of other software projects that could benefit from
> a relicensing of the AMR codec (pretty much every FOSS Linux
> distribution and media player) then please forward to them this
> message.
>
Hi Dotan,

Thanks for the interest in improving the codec support for Totem.
Unfortunately, from looking at the 3GPP questionnaire and their website,
3GPP does not have the rights to licensing the code itself, simply the
rights to providing access and redistribution right for the specs:

  "According to the Article 3.2.2 of the Third Generation Partnership
   Project Agreement, the 3GPP Organizational Partners jointly own
   copyright on the Technical Specifications and the Technical Reports
   approved by 3GPP."

Voiceage apparently has the IP rights to the AMR codec
(http://www.voiceage.com/amr_licterms.php) and requires payment on a per
use basis, which is obviously not possible for us. As stated in the bug,
our current best hope is to wait until support in ffmpeg is complete.

Thanks,
Robbie

-- 
Robbie Williamson                                  robbiew at ubuntu.com
Ubuntu Foundations Team
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam

"You can't be lucky all the time, but you can be smart everyday"
 -Mos Def

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