everyday multimedia not supported in Ubunt : Mp3 Patent issue

[Rainer Gutkas]

Mathew, it's a good point you've taken. So you're right that if we find a way to decode mp3 and so on that isn't covered by the patent it's completely legal to do it and for what I know (I'm not completly sure bout if you gotta  have this patent proofed too) ditribute it.

But it's a difficult task, because it's not the code that counts. So code is protected by Copyright, which can be easaly worked around by flipping two lines which don't matter that you flip it. Patent right not about code or better said the implementation, it's about ideas. There are two different aspects to be mentioned in patent right, one is an apperature and the other are means. An apperature (hope I write this right) is an abstract maschine that does something, means are the things you use, better said the way you do it. From the patent holders point of few the more abstract the patent is, the more it covers. That's what a patent lawer does he abstracts thing, so much they still work and don't hit another patent. The patent institutions then test (think it through) if the patent works and if another patent hurts the new one, if thats true it's not a new invention and hurts patent law.
The first problem that occurs is to get the patents, there are online datases which can be used to derive the information, but they are quite expensive for what I know. The second thing is to unterstand what the patent does, a hard task because patents are very abstract and the language used is really hard to unterstand (I transleted patents from english to german so I know that English patents are quite ok, American english patents are a hard task and Japanese English patents are horrible, no change to understand a word, because there's not much english, they are normally one to one translations from japenese carried out by computers).  
So if you know what patents you may not touch and understand what they do you gotta find completley other way to do it, i think that's really hard too, but lets say you get figured that out.
Then you need a patent lawer for each country you wanna only test if what you do is covered by a patent. And that's the real expensive part. You gotta pay the patent lawer (it has to be a local citizen according to patent right, at least in europe it's like that) and you gotta pay the testers from the patent agencies.... So if you do this world wide you pay a lot, you've gotta be millionair.
I don't know if this is really worth the effort...for me it would be much more worth to prevent software patents (at least in europe where i live and the plan to software patent laws. If i'm right you got this in america?), because from a practicle point of few a giant company could easaly steel a patent from a poor linux programmer, because they know that law is slow and in patent law you need two lawers (the patent lawer, who is an technician with patent law exams added and a normal lawer), for each country you want to protect your patent. So you need really lot's of money for this....

Yours,

Rainer

>The thing is, the company that patented MP3 doesn't care >about 
>end-users.  They care about the money they make by >licensing their 
>codecs to the companies that make media players for macs >and wintel 
>boxes.

>Just a question.  I know it is illegal to copy the code >they distribute 
>to decode MP3s.  But would it be legal if we could find >an alternative 
>decoder that isn't created by them?
>And regardless, it will never be enough for us.  We are >users of linux! 
>  We converted because Microsoft OSs weren't enough, and >because we 
>believe we can do better.  So why stop at that?  True, >we may never 
>reach perfection, but the closer we get to it, the >closer we get to 
>toppling the behemoth known as Microsoft!

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