Thomson: MP3 Licensing Same As It Ever Was

Thomson Multimedia is downplaying the recently reported change in the licensing of patented MP3 technology as nothing more than a trivial, semantic change. In a NewsForge report today, Robin ("roblimo") Miller quotes a spokesman who denies that any change in the licensing terms has taken place, "that Thomson laid down its licensing terms long ago, and that if Thomson's terms are not compatible with the GPL today, then they never were." The patent encumbrance of MP3 codecs has worried Free software enthusiasts for a long time; if the recent wording change represents no change in policy, it seems that they really have been right all along. (NewsForge, like Slashdot, is part of the sinister OSDN keiretsu.)

Comments

Author is violating the GPL

[mbrubeck]

Let's say I publish a program containing an MP3 decoder. If I release my code under the GNU GPL, I thereby declare that recipients of the code have all the rights granted by the GPL. But I don't have the authority to grant them those rights, because some of the code is covered by the Thomson patents.

This is especially bad if my program contains code written by other programmers and released under the GPL. These programmers could then sue me for incorporating their code into software that is not freely redistributable as required by the GPL.

The GNU GPL anticipates this issue, and explicitly states in section 7:

For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

By the way, this is not a hypothetical issue for me. I'm a developer of Audacity, a GPL program that includes the MAD mp3 decoder. We are currently discussing the situation on the development mailing list. See this message for a discussion of some options we are considering.