[MPlayer-dev-eng] KiSS of copyright

[Ivan Kalvachev]

Hello,
There have passed over a month after the news and slashdot article about
KiSS Technologies infriguate GPL and MPlayer copyright.
For one month I haven't heard anything to be done. In the last legal dispute
in g2 maillist I heard that Gabucino had handled the case, and knowing now
well Gabucino had solved Debian dispute I'm quite woried.

 My qestions are:
1. What have been done so far?

2. Have we any corespondeny with KiSS Techologies?
They should already had finished internal investigation.

3. Does they tried to negotiate in some form?

4. Have they removed the code under question in their latest (not gzip-ed)
firmware?


 I suggest:
1. Creating maillist mplayer-legal (i think that somebody made joke about
it).

2. Bringing back attention on KiSS on mphq homepage. Now the issue is buried
under a lot of other news. From my point of view we had reconciled it.
Brobably it looks the same from KiSS point of view.

3. Send few official mails to KiSS Technologies. These mails should be
discussed in legal and signed by at least 5 developers.

4. We should request the source code that is under question. We need it for
two things. To find out when and from where it have been deriviated (as I
said
ffdshow use a lot of mplayer code including subtitle reader). To find
the people that hold copyright on that code (I believe that I'm not one
of them, I have one subtitle dumper not reader).

5. We should know the name of the person(s) that had stolen our code.
Eventually of what else he/they had worked on (wihtout requesting
source code, for now)

6. We should also discuss our compensation. I really doubt that a company
will release it's propriate code without court order. More probably they
will pay for copyright infringment. I don't think that we shold take money
but some hardware and documentation (patent grants?) will be welcome.

7. We should see how other projects have defended their copyrights (e.g.
XviD)
what layers have they used and in what contract. As somebody said we may
request donnotation from our users. But first we should know how much money
we will need.

8. If we cannot or don't want to defend out copyright they we really should
think about giving copyrights to FSF that to defend it for us. GPL is one
of the strongest and tough licences, we should be really lame asses if
we don't use it.

Best Regards
   Ivan Kalvachev
  iive