Legal update

[Rahul Sundaram]

Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> 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.

I had the impression that it was about linking to the repository package 
directly instead of just the website? If even linking to the website 
itself from a dialog box in codeina is not ok with Red Hat Legal, we 
could either update http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CodecBuddy or in the 
second dialog where it lists the Fluendo codecs, we could introduce a 
new link that says "click here for free alternatives" or something 
similar. Is that ok?

Rahul