[NBLUG/talk] Political discussions on NBLUG

Omar Eljumaily omar at omnicode.com
Wed Sep 23 11:12:19 PDT 2015


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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