Announcing rpmfusion

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Wed Sep 12 18:48:59 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 12:00 -0600, Richi Plana wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 21:49 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > I am not talking about any repo files. Just a pointer in documentation 
> > or in any application. The details are explained in FAB list. That 
> > requires Legal to look into this. No amount of layman arguments can help 
> > us make a decision and legal perspectives doesn't always make logical 
> > sense which many tend to assume.
> 
> In other words, Fedora's lawyers have deemed it risky (or even downright
> illegal) to include in the distro .repo files that would allow users to
> download, say, US-illegal codecs even if the repository itself
> physically and logistically isn't connected to Fedora. But pointers in
> documents can.
> 
> There we go. That's what the legal experts are saying. Do I have it
> about right?

It's called contributory infringement.

In the United States, 35 U.S.C. § 271(b) defines (active) induced
infringement: "Whoever actively induces infringement of a patent shall
be liable as an infringer."

This means, we cannot point to a repo which contains software which
infringes upon software patents, or we are just as liable as the people
actually infringing the patents. We can't include a repo file, nor can
we say "the files are over there".

Not in CodecBuddy, not in yum, not in a tree, not with a cat.

No.

~spot




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list