[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: libdca (was Re: Patent Infrigement)

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 05:50:46PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 10:41:01AM +0200, Attila Kinali wrote:
> > On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 11:39:34 +0200
> > Luca Barbato <lu_zero at gentoo.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > So what's the solution going to be?
> > > > 
> > > Start hosting it in every eu country and see how they will have fun
> > > sending C&D all over spending money just to discover the target moves
> > > faster than their letters?
> > > Their patent looks illegal and I'm not sure how much they are confident
> > > if it comes verify it.
> > 
> > That's just stupid. After the second time you've been dragged to
> > curt you will not easily get of with a "i didn't know there was a patent"
> > anymore but will be sued for knowingly breaking the law. Or in
> > short: This isn't going to work this way.
> > 
> > The only thing we can do is either invalidate the patent or
> > prevent software patents from getting trough the EU parliament.
> 
> There is still the problem that we wish to have DTS decoding now and
> giving in to patent threats is a bad thing strategically.  IOW, we need
> to find a place to host libdca, at all cost.

While I agree caving to patent claims is bad, I also don't find DTS
that useful. Any DVD with DTS also has AC3 tracks which are perfectly
good, since DVD players are not required to support DTS (afaik). Maybe
someone will start releasing rips with DTS audio only, but I've never
heard of such a thing, so I think, practically speaking, there are
formats that are much more important to support than DTS...

Rich