Legal update

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 13:56 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Rahul Sundaram (sundaram at fedoraproject.org) said: 
> >>> Linking to "third party repositories": Legal says that we can link, from
> >>> the Fedora website, to third party repositories, so long as no one has
> >>> made a critical assessment to determine that a patent or patents cover
> >>> the technology in question and no party has actually asserted their
> >>> patents against the technology, we should be okay. Once we are on notice
> >>> of a claim of infringement or are aware of a competent assessment that
> >>> concludes infringement is likely, we would need to take the link down or
> >>> run a serious risk of facing a claim for inducing infringement.  Merely
> >>> linking would be highly unlikely to subject us to a claim of direct
> >>> infringement. I asked about MP3, and it was stated that unless we are
> >>> specifically aware of the MP3 patent holders asserting a claim against
> >>> the technology, we are still okay.
> >> So the real question now that Red Hat Legal is ok with it is whether we in 
> >> the Fedora Project should be doing it?
> >>
> >> I think we should link to RPM Fusion (the free part) in the future if and 
> >> when it's up and running from codeina
> > 
> > ... in what way? The codeina codec list is included in the packaging.
> 
> In the initial dialog box perhaps? I don't know what would be the most 
> appropriate thing to do.

You cannot link to livna/RPM Fusion from within a package, RH Legal was
very clear on that. You can link to the Fedoraproject.org page that
links to it, but not directly to it.

~spot