On Mon, 13 Feb 2012, Matt Giuca
I'm not trying to incite flaming. The reason I said that it transforms it is that at least in today's environment, all free software developers (GPL and BSD-like) know to avoid patents wherever possible. I'm not going to write a BSD-licensed video player that uses H.264 when I can use WebM.
The problem here is that your video player will be written to play a certain set of video files, you will want that set to be as large as possible and therefore you will have a good incentive to support formats such as H.264 which are widely used.
Under my (hypothetical) BSD philosophy, I'm happy for proprietary software manufacturers to use my (hypothetical) video player. Now let's make a law that exempts free software from patent litigation. Now free software developers are going to stop worrying about patents, and I may very well implement a video player using H.264 (being the more popular standard), without fear of patent litigation. However, what I may have forgotten is that my downstream proprietary software manufacturers (who I am philosophically happy to use my software) will be unable to use my software without patent risk.
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free You can get Debian packages of ffmpeg without patent infringing code (from debian.org) or with patent infringing code (from the above APT repository which until recently was mirrored by Optus in Australia). Presumably if you developed your own video player you would be able to do whatever the ffmpeg package maintainers did. I'm not sure which packages are closer to upstream, but in any case it has been demonstrated that it's either not difficult to remove patent infringing code or not difficult to add it to an otherwise non-infringing base for the benefit of people who live in suitable jurisdictions. Also I doubt that there would be any problem with a commercial organisation paying license fees to Frauhofer etc and using packages from debian- multimedia.org. In fact it would probably be a good way for the patent companies to make money, have Debian people develop code that uses their patented technology and then have commercial Debian users and distributors pay them.
So while the *copyright* status of my software is still permissive (BSD), the *patent* status is effectively at a GPL level of restriction (you can only use this in a free software project). When you say "That's no different to today's situation though," I think it is different, because free software projects will be more inclined to implement patent-encumbered standards.
Yes, and this would be a bad thing. Merely making Debian users jump through a few hoops to get H.264 playing and MP4 writing encourages everyone involved to use different formats whenever possible. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/