Ubuntu – the legal status of libraries in Ubuntu

legallibraries

I cannot find a good source of information in regard to the legal status of some libraries and applications in Ubuntu 11.10, and I am hoping to find some answers here.

Firstly, it seems Ubuntu includes libjasper1 by default, the legal status of which in the United States, as I understand it, may not be in the clear, as JPEG-2000 may not be free to distribute. What is the story here? If the U.S. cracks down on software patent infringement, will this affect Ubuntu deployments in the U.S.? I really don't care about people's opinions on the legitimacy of such laws, nor do I want any advice to the effect that I should ignore them. I want a straight answer about reality as it is now.

Secondly, even when you disable Multiverse, software like Audacity and Inkscape are still available, I guess in Universe, and can easily be installed along with legally questionable dependencies. Audacity should not be packaged with mp3 import support by default in Ubuntu, but it is, having libmp3lame and libmad0 as dependencies, which encodes and decodes mp3. My understanding is that even decoding mp3 is not legal in the United States and Japan among others. Inkscape requires Imagemagick, which also includes JPEG-2000 support. Thus, perhaps there are packages that should be in Multiverse that are not.

Certainly Audacity's libmad0 is a functioning mp3 decoder that is not exclusively in Multiverse, and libmp3lame (which I believe allows encoding) is also easily available with Multiverse disabled, and are also unnecessary dependencies for Audacity. Fedora, for example, just builds Audacity without mp3 support. Furthermore, libjasper1 is a dependency of nearly everything in the default Ubuntu system, which is odd. It seems that you cannot open or save .jp2 files in ImageViewer.

Anyhow, I need to know what the legal status of these libraries and programs are so that I can safely install Ubuntu and travel with Ubuntu. I hope to get an answer soon.

Best Answer

MP3 Legal Issues

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Lame_Installation#Legal_issues

  • While the LAME source code is free, the encoding technology that ready-compiled LAME binaries use is patented. The patents are held by Fraunhofer and administered by Thomson. Patenting raises a theoretical possibility that in some countries a user might need to pay a licence fee to legally encode MP3s. This might vary according to the purpose of the encoding and whether the software being used is licensed. There is no definitive list of countries where the patents unambiguously hold sway. However they are generally assumed to be enforceable in USA, Canada, the EEC and Japan. This means that in these countries (in theory), software that encodes MP3s must be licensed by the patent holders, and that anyone encoding MP3s with unlicensed encoders may also be infringing patents.

The best advice that can be given is that the user makes their own decision, based on their conscience, the country they are in, and taking into account the following:

  • The patent holders have tended to enforce licence fees against commercial rather than free MP3 encoders
  • Thomson themselves have said that no license is needed by individuals creating music libraries of MP3 files for personal use (interpretations vary whether that sanctions using unlicensed encoders, free or otherwise)
  • MP3 patents will expire worldwide between 2010 and 2012.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

  • In September 1998, the Fraunhofer Institute sent a letter to several developers of MP3 software stating that a license was required to "distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders". The letter claimed that unlicensed products "infringe the patent rights of Fraunhofer and Thomson. To make, sell and/or distribute products using the [MPEG Layer-3] standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us." The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S. MP3 license revenues generated about €100 million for the Fraunhofer Society in 2005.
  • The group that holds the patent on MP3's demands that for each player with MP3 support a 75 cent fee must be paid:

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html

  • However, 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 gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.

http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/#5

While you can legally distribute and use the MP3 format, the content of these files is what gets you "in trouble" i.e. you can't distribute Copyrighted Content such as Songs and make profit but of course you can use (listen to) them.

  • Mp3 of course is open for all end-user applications (that is, we
    don't license end-users).

http://www.mp3licensing.com/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CDRipping

  • If you live in a country where it is legal to use this format, to encode MP3s, you can use Sound Juicer which uses gstreamer and the LAME mp3 encoder. The following should also work with other programs that use gstreamer:

    1. Enable the universe and multiverse repositories. Then, install the package ubuntu-restricted-extras (which is not included by default, it is the end-user that chooses to install it).
    2. If you now restart Sound Juicer via Applications > Sound & Video > Audio CD Extractor you will find the new audio formats available under Edit > Preferences.

(It is illegal to copy music from a CD and redistribute it unless you have the copyright owner's permission).

You can legally use the Fluendo MP3 decoder available in the Partners repository.

If anything you are better of using:

Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC are patent free.

  • Ogg Vorbis is similar to mp3 except it is of course free. It compresses audio to save space while retaining audio quality. The quality of vorbis was tested to be higher or equal to competitors such as wma and apple audio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_vorbis

  • FLAC is a lossless free software format, which means it creates an exact replica of the audio you convert it from. (Mp3 and vorbis remove quality to save space). I personally use flac, which means I get full quality 44,100hz 16bit CD audio saving almost half the space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac

JPEG 2000 Legal issues

JPEG 2000 is by itself licensed, but the contributing companies and organizations agreed that licenses for its first part—the core coding system—can be obtained free of charge from all contributors. The JPEG committee has stated:

  • It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its standards should be implementable in their baseline form without payment of royalty and license fees... The up and coming JPEG 2000 standard has been prepared along these lines, and agreement reached with over 20 large organizations holding many patents in this area to allow use of their intellectual property in connection with the standard without payment of license fees or royalties.

However, the JPEG committee has also noted that undeclared and obscure submarine patents may still present a hazard:

  • It is of course still possible that other organizations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementers are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area

Because of this statement, controversy remains in the software community concerning the legal status of the JPEG 2000 standard.

However, many Linux distributions include a JPEG 2000 library

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000#Legal_issues

Licensing:

GPL & LGPL

  1. “GPL” stands for “General Public License”. The most widespread such license is the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL for short. This can be further shortened to “GPL”, when it is understood that the GNU GPL is the one intended.

    The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.

  2. Short for Lesser General Public License, the license that accompanies some open source software that details how the software and its accompany source code can be freely copied, distributed and modified.The LGPL and GPL licenses differ with one major exception; with LGPL the the requirement that you open up the source code to your own extensions to the software is removed.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

Creative Commons

  • The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law
    1. Attribution
    2. Attribution-ShareAlike
    3. Attribution-NoDerivs
    4. Attribution-NonCommercial
    5. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
    6. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

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