[MPlayer-users] Re: [MPlayer-users] ASF patenting ?

[Clemens Wächter]

On Sat, 13 Jul 2002 07:48:50 +0200
Gábor Lénárt <lgb at lgb.hu> wrote:

> > 
> > Well... killing people is forbidden and guns can do that...
> > 
> > Mencoder is not a program for transcoding from asf to anoter. It is for
> > transcoding various formats, then, nobody can say the people who made
> > mencoder made a program for transcoding asf.
> 
> Well, you're right ... in theory. However eg in Hungary you must pay for
> raw CD-R medias a fee which includes some amount of money for copyright
> issues: they assume that you will use it to store somewhat illegal MP3s
> and other stuffs on it (even if you don't want to do that).
> 
> Or just think about the issue of MP3 players when RIAA sued an MP3 player
> manufacturer because these kind of player are CAPABLE OF playing illegal
> MP3s ..........
> 
> - Gábor (larta'H)
> 

Well, in theory this is also right. Here in Germany we pay that additional
fee for writeable media, too. But its funny, although we payed for it, it
does not make recording mp3s or movies legal, its still forbidden. 
So you pay for the media, the recorder, and (assuming you have bought it)
for the cd. 
So, lets assume you have bought the cd and you are making a copy, say as
a backup for your children to destory or to hear it in your car. This copy
is perfectly legal but you have payed three times for it. 
Now assume you haven't bought the cd and you have downloaded the music.
You write it to a cd, and now you have payed the additional fee for the
recorder and the cd, but your copy remains illegal.
And I'll just have a wild guess: Its the same in Hungary. And many european
countries, too.

This does not make sense to me. So, what do we learn from this example:
jurisdiction is not always logical. Thats what makes it so difficult.
You could say that anyone who has the best lobby and/or the biggest
purse is able to reserve any rights (compare to Metallicas "...And justice
for all")

So we can't argue logically. The only thing we could really claim in court
in the asf->avi case is that mencoder is a collection of sources, not a
full executable program, as written in the docs. But then we have to stop
creating .rpm distributions. 

So what the community badly needs are free lawyers or protection by the
govournment. But it doesn't seem that there will be any of these in the
near future.

Just my 2¢

Clemens Wächter