Re: Is anyone packaging `lame' ?
On Mon, Jun 12, 2000 at 09:27:49PM +0200, Jorgen 'forcer' Schaefer wrote:
> German patent laws don't allow to have a patent on an algorithm
> alone, only together with a technical (hardware) procedure. I'm
> not a lawyer and i'm not sure about the phrasing of either the
> patent law or the frauenhofer patent, but it could be worthwhile
> to check in how far the patent disallows distribution of lame
> (without frauenhofer code).
What I have read once (I think it was in c't) is that there is a patent
on the seven-or-so steps of mp3 encoding. That this, however, would
only apply to implementations of this procedure.
IOW: Splitting mp3 encoding into two separate programs (one taking the
sound files, doing the first half of processing and writing a
preprocessed sound format and the other one taking that, applying the
other half of the steps to create a mp3 file) would not be covered by
that specific patent. Neither program would do the actual mp3 encoding
as described in the patent.
But IANAPL, of course.
--
Andreas E. Bombe <andreas.bombe@munich.netsurf.de> DSA key 0x04880A44
http://home.pages.de/~andreas.bombe/ http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/
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