Posted by: Gergely Máté
on July 05 2009
OK, so you have recommended a GNU/Linux flavour to someone who is interested, and you go and help her in installing her new system. Linux understands all the hardware, everything turns out to be a success (except for the to-be-spanked webcam), and here is a new desktop computer filled with free software. And than your fellow wants to watch some online video or listen to an MP3 stream - quite usual things to do. And the new system tells you, that it is intended to download some interesting things called "codecs" which are needed in order to watch a video or listen to an audio stream. And the new Linux-based desktop system tells the user that this may or may not be illegal in any particular country - Continue or Cancel? No more information is given.
And most users click Continue... And many users start to violate immediately their country's patent laws. Is this a crime?
If this is a crime - an illegal thing to do -, than the user is responsible for committing it. This must be a very small crime, but it is illegal. Some patent holders will not get their patent fees. And it is not about software patents - these are somewhat more complex technological patents, established for a long-long time. You can debate on it, but it is out there in the legal code, and is violated day by day. This is a small crime by an individual, and probably never ever will anybody punish an individual for this. But this has a bigger effect when you consider a larger scale of deployments. Ten million small individual crimes may add up to a large patent fee not paid, and that is a loss from the due payments of the economy. Audio and video codec developers... Many many company.
Most GNU/Linux distributions encourage this small crime - it is really easy, one click to commit it, and there is quite few information about it being committed. There are codec packs with paid patents for Linux systems, but the basic setup will not tell about it - instead, it shows just that small dialog. May be illegal. You can not know. We don't know either. Continue or Cancel?
