[NBLUG/talk] Political discussions on NBLUG

Steve S. northbaygeek at gmail.com
Wed Sep 23 11:47:07 PDT 2015


There is a fairly broad and high-level precis of the evolution of MP3,
and recent lawsuits/etc, over on Wikipedia.  Tecnicolor (nee Thompson)
and the Fraunhofer Institute seem to be the primary owners (they were
among the original developers), but they paid to settle claims made by
Sisvel.  "Texas MP3" sued Apple, Samsung, and SanDisk; again, settled
out of court.  Alcatel/Lucent also asserts patent rights (by way of
AT&T, another of the original dev-team), at one point suing Microsoft.

Wikipedia introduces the whole can of worms thus:
"Many organizations have claimed ownership of patents related to MP3
decoding or encoding. These claims have led to a number of legal
threats and actions from a variety of sources, resulting in
uncertainty about which patents must be licensed in order to create
MP3 products without committing patent infringement in countries that
allow software patents."

I'd like to see some comprehensive (c)-reform, not just piecemeal'ing
THIS codec and THAT network-stack, etc etc etc...   :-)


On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Omar Eljumaily <omar at omnicode.com> wrote:
> The only MP3 lawsuit that I'm aware of is with Sandisk in Europe. Still,
> even if they involve big companies like Sandisk and or Microsoft or Apple,
> there's a different set of motivations and probably judicial points of view.
>
> There's a big difference between a commercial company saying that it doesn't
> want to pay royalties and a group of open source developers who want to
> freely distribute technology.
>
> The remaining MP3 patents are bogus as far as I can tell.  They mostly have
> to do with digitizing frequency spectrums and tossing out ones that are
> insignificant from a psycho-acoustic standpoint. People had been doing that
> for years before MP3 every came along. Ogg/Vorbis basically does the same
> thing, but since it results in a different format, nobody bothers with them.
>
>
>
>
> On 9/23/2015 10:49 AM, Steve S. wrote:
>>
>> RE "Happy Birthday" -- the court ruled that the original transfer of
>> (c) -- back before any of us were born, I daresay -- was only for a
>> specific piano arrangement of the melody (which was otherwise already
>> in the public domain), and NOT for the lyrics to the song.  So, there
>> has been no VALID (c)-defense for many decades; so, the song is now in
>> the public domain.
>>
>> MP3, alas, is a much murkier affair, with multiple technical claims.
>> It DOES get challenged in court -- regularly -- and it's a mess every
>> time.
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Omar Eljumaily <omar at omnicode.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On the topic of copyrights and public domain.  This is interesting. A
>>> judge
>>> just ruled that the song "Happy Birthday to You" is in the public domain.
>>>
>>> http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/09/23/happy-birthday-song-public-domain/
>>>
>>> It reminds me of the issue with MP3 and other codec patents.  Nobody has
>>> the
>>> guts to challenge them in court, so they appear to stand. Furthermore,
>>> companies like Apple and Microsoft probably benefit from the patents by
>>> keeping other entities out of their media handling space.
>>>
>>> The issue is definitely related to Linux.  It's the reason most Linux
>>> distros don't ship with MP3 codecs.  Maybe people should be more
>>> aggressive
>>> about challenging some of these marginal patent claims.
>>>
>>> Omar
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 9/21/2015 4:16 PM, Allan Cecil wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'll put on my more official E-Mail for this response.
>>>>
>>>> Agreed, the talk list is specifically for general chatter about anything
>>>> Linux, answers to questions, conversations about Open Source, technology
>>>> in
>>>> general, copyleft discussions, etc.  I definitely don't want a political
>>>> thread going (and said so in my reply) but I'm not opposed to a
>>>> discussion
>>>> of what a candidate who has historically been an advocate for copyright
>>>> reform and open source software is trying to accomplish.  To rephrase
>>>> that,
>>>> Lawrence Lessig appears to be trying to bring more openness to the
>>>> voting
>>>> process and to that end I'm not opposed to discussing that aspect as I
>>>> consider it within the spirit of the talk list.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, you are definitely free to ignore that conversation as well,
>>>> and I wouldn't blame you. :)  Thanks for your reply,
>>>>
>>>> A.C.
>>>> ******
>>>> President, North Bay Linux User's Group
>>>>
>>>> On 09/21/2015 03:55 PM, steve wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Thank god for filters on thunderbird.  This thread goes straight to the
>>>>> trash.  I have lots of other places for poly-ticks.  I don't want that
>>>>> from
>>>>> NBLUG.
>>>>>
>>>>> Steve S.
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>> talk at nblug.org
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>>>>>
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>>
>
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-- 
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of
childishness and the desire to be very grown up."      -CS Lewis


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