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Do "Illegal" Codecs Actually Scare Linux Users?
jammag writes "In this article, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out why he keeps giving money to Microsoft and Apple despite the clear advantages of Linux: the scary legalese dialogs you have to click through to install codecs for common multimedia formats. Quoting: 'Despite strong points that go far beyond price, Linux falls short when it comes to legally supporting file formats such as MP3, WMA/WMV and DVDs.' He talks about using Ubuntu and booting up Totem Movie Player, only to be confronted with a burst of legalese about what a hardened criminal he'll be if he uses Totem without a license. This problem is 'a deal breaker' for him."
Almost all software (especially proprietary) requires you to click through a EULA that threatens to assult you with lawyers if you don't play nice.
With all the noise the RIAA and MPAA are making about copyright violations (and the subsequent lawsuits) can you blame him? If Linux ever starts making serious dents into Microsoft's market share, how long until they begin employing similar tactics?
If there is no legal (or affordable) way for me to obtain the software/video/etc I would likeI pirate it. I watch a fair share of anime and typically the only way to get certain series or to not have to wait a few years for it to come stateside is to download the fan subs and then watch them with my "illegal codes" on my linux box. I never lost any sleep about it, not sure why anyone else would even blink at it. It certainly does not solve the problem at hand but it is an effective workaround for the time being.
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
That is only a problem for countries that enforce software patents, that is, IIRC, the USA. If he admits that Linux is better than the alternative, but he feels somehow constrained by the warnings and restrictions, he can either vote with his money (that he does) and buy a software that doesn't "put him off", or vote with his feet and move from the country that imposes such restrictions on him. He can also join the choir and try to change this absurd legislation that allows people to patent algorithms instead of implementations, but I'm trying to keep it real, for once.
the scary legalese dialogs you have to click through [CC] to install codecs for common multimedia formats.
apt-get install w32codecs
Wow that was super scary. I'm so glad it's over...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If your entire collection of mp3s is illegal to begin with, who cares if the software you have to install to play them is illegal too?
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
From TFA: "...it's a perfect example of what's wrong with Linux and the concept of free software. Free software is great in isolation, but as soon as you have a situation where you're trying to integrate it with modern proprietary file formats, the idea falls apart at the seams."
Maybe the problem is with all the modern proprietary formats? I think this is a pretty crap argument, similar to how a dearth of Linux drivers is somehow Linux's fault.
There might be a better solution out there. By all means we should try to find it. But a click-through warning is pretty damn good, if it enables free to play with non-free.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
He's apparently never read the EULAs for his Microsoft ware. Now that is scary stuff...
Perhaps the author of the article should instead complain about the way all these people make proprietary file formats and wonder how we got into the awful situation where we have to pay everybody and their brother in order to do a simple thing like listen to music on your computer. It seems to me that that's where the problem is. Patents and ridiculous companies who want their cake and eat it too by having their format be 'standard' while they still own all the rights to use it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I beg to differ. If I am thinking of using linux in an enterprise and I need my people to play with media , it does indeed scare the users to see a disclaimer like this. Unfortunately this is another blow that stops adoption.
Most people don't want to see stuff like this when they load up software , it does scare them.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
Should be "Do 'Illegal' Codecs Actually Scare Potential Linux Users?", because that's what the article's about. I don't think most actual Linux users (myself included, though I don't live in the US, so it's not even illegal for me) care about the legality of the codecs. They just want to listen to the music and watch the movies they paid for.
What is important is the content - ie not ripping off someone's copyright for the piece of music, film, ... That I don't do. If I can't obtain it legally then I won't play it -- I might not like the copyright on music (being for so many years and all that) but I will respect it.
See what I mean about the different between format & content ?
Fluendo currently sells MPEG2, MPEG4, Dolby AC3 and Windows Media codecs legally. They also give you the MP3 codec free of charge.
If you want peace of mind and avoid being a criminal in countries with silly laws, then these may be something for you.
"I am not gaining anything out of it"
Then why are you doing it?
"am not making or denying any profit to any organization"
Except Microsoft. I guess they don't count because they are 'evil'.
"It is wrong and invasive, therefore the issue is moot."
Right, 2 wrongs always make a right.
"How many feds know a thing about Linux anyway?"
This matters because... ?
In the end, it doesn't matter whether you think it's 'right' or 'wrong', it's illegal and you take a risk by using the codecs in this fashion. I happen to think it's stupid as well, but it's still the law.
Has it ever actually stopped anyone from using them? There's probably someone, somewhere that's paranoid of the government and thinks it's a trap, so yeah... Maybe.
Don't try to rationalize that this activity is not illegal just because it's not immoral or unethical in your eyes (or anyone else's). The 2 are completely unrelated.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
why would they put up such clear and understandable dialog boxes which just end up scaring the user. They should follow Microsoft's lead and put all that in 5-10 pages of legalese and call it an EULA. Then, their users will see that, maybe read one or two lines before hitting the [OK] button.
;-)
Shame on the Ubuntu developers for putting in such a simple and clearly understandable dialog box.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Remember, you only have to wait 4 more years for the MP3 patent to become public:
The various patents claimed to cover MP3 by different patent-holders have many different expiration dates, ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S. [9]. However, U.S. patents can only last up to 20 years, and MP3 was released as a specification in 1991, so if U.S. courts applied U.S. law, no patent could apply beyond 2011 to MP3 itself.[10] In the U.S., any patent claiming to cover the fundamentals of MP3 after 2012 should (by law) be struck down as an invalid patent, due to the existence of published prior art (the MP3 specification) more than a year before the patent's filing. If it had been published earlier (such as in public drafts), the latest date would be even earlier. However, it is unclear if U.S. courts would enforce this. The situation in other countries that permit software patents is similar.
--From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
PowerDVD for Linux
So why do people think that Linux players and community shun AAC or H264? here on slashdot posters tend to tout MP3. I think it's the conflation of AAC and fairplay DRM. Or simply that AAC permits DRM at all. But shouldn't people really embrace AAC precisely because it lacks MP3's player royalties?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The owners of the mp3 codec only want a cut of profits from people who want to sell mp3 encoders/decoders. From their FAQ at http://www.webcitation.org/5MeUrGbFN
"...no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00..."
The bigger story is you (Linux community) *still* don't get it.
One of the many, many reasons Linux hasn't taken over the desktop is that people are intimidated by the Linux community. You can respond all you like about big companies pushing Linux, how respectable it is, IBM is Linux friendly, etc., and all it demonstrates to me is you still don't get it. The perception is of the uber-geek community speaking in a foreign language with high disdain for users who don't care about the mechanics but just want to get their job done, enjoy the Internet, send e-mail, and maybe play the occasional game.
So take this article and respond how you will. But if your response falls along the lines of "who cares about it being illegal" or "never mind that, the real problem is DRM" or the other stock standard responses from the Slashdot crowd, it only shows that you still don't get it. And perhaps you never really will.
Since always?
Check out the wikipedia page or the patent licensing page for more info.
Why would you assume it's an ANSI standard and freely available?
I laughed when I saw this article.
This is just making excuses not to use Linux because they can't think of any real ones.
And he said in TFA that he uses Windows so he MUST have read the EULA at one time or another. Unless he decided it was too complicated and just clicked-through. I'm with you, this is either a TROLL or he's incompetent to write such an article since at the very least, he should have also discussed the MS EULA.
0 6/09/a_contract_only.html
There was a really good article on the MS XP EULA called "Windows XP EULA in Plain English" by linuxadvocate.org but that site seems to be gone and I can't find a mirror or PDF of it. Just a small hint of how bad the MS EULA is can be found in this short article which states that Microsoft has in their EULA that they are not liable for breach of contract. Read on, it's just a page or two long:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/20
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This totally misses the point. Winamp's (for example) EULA may be long and tedious and nobody reads it, but it doesn't say that using it may be illegal. Why? Because winamp (AOL) paid fruanhofer for a patent licence to decode MP3.
Amarok (again, for example), hasn't paid Fraunhofer for a MP3 patent licence, hence you may actually be breaking the law by using a patented technique without a licence.
Of course, I think this is totally ludicrous and algorithms shouldn't be patentable. But for now at least, that is the law in U.S.
And that's why your comments are off the mark.
IIRC, anyone is allowed to take the standard, write a codec for it, and play mp3s as much as they like, legally, for either a royalty fee per copy or US $50 000. The license fees are here. (When it says US $2.50 - $5.00 per unit I presume it's per copy of the codec, not per song).
I believe the technical term is "RAND" (Reasonable and Non Discriminatory) licensing: Thomson S.A and the Fraunhofer Institute are playing nice, they don't refuse anyone who wants to license their invention (they have that monopoly right because it's a patent), and they don't change their mind about the license price when they don't like you (they have that monopoly right because it's a patent).
There's only one catch, that RAND doesn't resonate with F/LOSS software at all.
This is why it matters that standards are not only open but that also RAND is out of the question if you want to allow FLOSS to use your patented standard; Suppose you ask a license fee of only $5.00 per copy of the software distributed, who's going to pay it? Licenses such as the FSF's GPL state that (paragraph 10 GPL3)
But, you want everyone who copies your program to pay you the $5.00 so you can pay Thomson back their rightful royalties! Do you see the problem? Suddenly you need an administration organisation to count who has downloaded the FLOSS program. And you are not allowed to sanction them if they don't comply because the license forbids you that. And you'd need to monitor everyone who downloaded it to see whether they copy the program further (which is their right by the GPL anyway) otherwise YOU piss off Thomson. etc. etc. It's a nightmare.
This is why there are no legal GPL'ed mp3 players. Incidentally, I think this is also why some British linux and mac users complain that the BBC wants to use a proprietary video standard which they can't be allowed to play.
Think about using Ogg/Vorbis and Ogg/Theora, will you?
Now let's see if we can also tie in the raging ODF - OOXML battle and then this fanboi will shut up :-)
AFAIK, this is why there is such a difference between "real open" data interchange standards such as ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) which is free to use because Sun have made an irrevocable patent pledge that they won't sue anyone ever for implementing ODF, and on the other hand OOXML (ISO *DRAFT* international standard 29500) where Microsoft states that they'll grant a R.a.n.D license for Office XML Schema. So it's all good, you see!
Can you still see under which walnut shell the pea is?
If I'm not horribly mistaken:
Office XML (R.a.n.D licensed)
=
Office 2003 XML
!=
Office 2007 XML
which is
Office Open XML (= nothing to do with OpenOffice.org which uses Open Document Format)
No worries!
I actually think they've amended their ways because on this page it states in quite reasonable terms that Office Open XML 1.0 (ECMA-376) is now a Covered Specification. Still I wouldn't trust it as far as I can throw a printed 6000 page document because on that same page it says:
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I don't feel bad because I've already paid for all of these 'illegal' codecs over and over again. I've bought numerous DVD players, computer DVD drives, video cards which decode mpeg*, a hardware WMV/AVI/DIVX/MPEG* player, an ATSC tv (mpeg again), dvd software packages (windvd, et. al.), computers with Windows (and the licenses for many of their codecs), and more.
For one PC I had to pay premiums on the video card, optical drives, motherboard and 3 pieces of software because of some 'illegal' codec that demands such a premium. Take decoding off video cards and the prices would drop. I'm not afraid because on this Ubuntu laptop I've a copy of Vista, shrunk to a 5 gig partition. Don't I keep some of those rights?
How many times do I have to pay for these same licenses? It's mainly MPEG-2, DVD which is the same, and any proprietary MPEG-4 codec (HDWMV, Divx, et. al.) I don't fear or feel bad about 'stealing' these codecs because I have paid for them a million times. I've played along, my choice of OS shouldn't stop me from continuing to take advantage of these codecs. Besides the video card is doing the lifting and NVidia has already paid that premium because it decodes most of these 'illegal' codecs natively (now a days).
Do I feel bad?
No.
Get your Unix fortune now!
* Download legally-questionable open-source codec
Legally questionable in the USA, please. In my country it's perfectly legal.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
That's a very dangerous point of view you have there. I have the unshakable belief that my government exists at my whim. If my government makes laws that I don't approve of, I will happily break them. I do it all the time. I also work where I can to change bad laws by communicating with my governmental representatives. That does not in any way make me a "sociopath." (It seems certain you don't know what sociopathy is.) This is, in point of fact, the long-established tradition of American behavior. If government starts acting in ways you don't approve of, and in addition starts to feel quite unrepresentative, our general solution is to stop following those laws.
I'm sure if Slashdot was around 40 years ago, you'd have been saying "coloreds" don't get it. All this "front of the bus" lawbreaking is positively sociopathic.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
You can't patent a mathmatical/logical algorithm. It's part of the paperwork in what is/is not patentable. A patent is supposed to be on an implimentation of a solution, not the concept of how to solve the problem. Thus, you can patent your design of an electric motor, but you can't patent the concept of an electric motor. The only reason software patents are allowed now is because the USPTO & The Fed court that governs patents don't read anything.
How many patents are there on razor blades? I count 8 on the razor I used this morning. How many are there on the MP3 Algorithm? ISTR there is only 1. Why? because the concept was patented not the implimentation.
The problem with software patents is that in order to provide more protection than copyright, they have to patent concepts not implimentations. As soon as they do that, they become broad enough to kill off whole swaths of programming that they don't even touch in the implimentation.
-"So, what did you do?"
-"I used a software that contained a patented technology. The distributor didn't pay royalties to the patent holder, because they are distributing it for $0.
Moreover, it was to watch a DVD : the media industry bought the law known as DMCA so that it would be illegal, among other things, to make a DVD player without buying a license from them, to legally circumvent the protection. As my media player software is developed by people who do it for free, they had no money to pay the license, and they illegally circumvented the protection. So I had to use a software that is twice illegal, only to enjoy a movie I've legally bought a copy of. At an artificially inflated price fixed by an illegal cartel that seems to focus very much on extortion these days. Oh, and, before I forget - the movie has recouped ten times its costs on the first week-end it was published, anyway."
Yeah... dreaming
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
One of the hallmarks of a sociopath is implying that other people are by putting words in their mouth then telling people that anybody who feels that way is displaying one of the hallmarks of being a sociopath.
Oh, wait, I have no idea what I'm talking about and am just spewing vitriol in a pathetic attempt to make myself sound big and tough and make it seem like I have a real argument! Oops.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
IANAL and all that, but if you have a legal copy of the codecs (e.g. a Windows license), you can use w32codecs and all the other ones without any legal issues. At least that's how I understood the mplayer codec pack disclaimer a few years ago.
So going back to Windows because of this is just plain dumb (unless it's a pirated version of Windows, which would be even dumber...)
Suppose I run a dual-boot and create a song on the Windows side. Then I boot into Linux and access the mp3 that I just created. I'm legally required to pay someone (for the codec) to listen to my own creation in Linux?
There is a wealth of free Linux distributions & free software out on the Internet and a far greater number of people will to devote time to helping others with Linux issues - however, to interact with that community, you need to demonstrate some self motivation and interest in your own computer, rather than expecting someone else to fix it.
Nobody is forcing you to use Linux. If Windows does the job you need it to do then stick with it - only one of the minority of Linux zealots would tell you to do otherwise.
Only when you've put some serious effort into learning Linux, and the general UNIX mindset, can you appreciate what it can do for your productivity in terms of security, stability & automation. Until then, don't even try to understand it...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
You're talking about millions of dollars in licensing fees; donations will never cover it.
I've never once had Windows find and install a codec for me when I click on the 'find codec on ma intarwebs' button. On the other hand, Ubuntu does it perfectly. All I have to do is click "I'm not in America and/or I'm in ur netwerks stealin ur codex". Also note that often the 'codec packs' you download to install DivX, xvid etc. contain at least some copyright-infringing code anyway. For example, "DivX ;-)" is the MS MPEG4 codec, hacked to read/write files in the AVI file format.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem