Software patents don't exist in most of the world [LWN.net]

Software patents don't exist in most of the world

Posted Jan 27, 2010 14:37 UTC (Wed) by dion (guest, #2764)
Parent article: Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

Remember back in the bad old days when another kind of math was illegal in some countries, back then there were "international" versions of many packages with all the crypto features and restricted versions for the US.

I wonder why Mozilla doesn't simply make an International build available that has h264 and and a gulag build without h264 for the poor, oppressed masses in the US and Japan.

Web site operators would need to either stream their video from The Free world or use Ogg Theora and stream from the US, but users behind the lawsuit-curtain could probably get their hands on a Free version of Firefox via Samizdat.

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Software patents don't exist in most of the world

Posted Jan 27, 2010 15:29 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Remember back in the bad old days when another kind of math was illegal in some countries, back then there were "international" versions of many packages with all the crypto features and restricted versions for the US.

You're mixing up a number of issues here:

Actual prohibition of encryption
Export restrictions
Patent claims

In fact, as I recall, the US versions of programs like Netscape Navigator/Communicator had "full-strength" encryption employing the patent-encumbered RSA technologies; most other countries got the "export-strength" encryption; countries like France had special encryption-free versions. I imagine that there may well have been programs used widely outside the US that would not have been tolerated in the US, but that would quite likely have more to do with patent claims than the other factors.

Yes, it's tempting to say "to hell" with the patent cartels, but doing so in their backyard while proliferating their technologies (and thus drawing vendors into having to support those technologies, thus funding those cartels still further) cannot be regarded as the most prudent strategy for an outfit like Mozilla.

Software patents don't exist in most of the world

Posted Jan 28, 2010 0:02 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

The assumption that H.264 is not patented outside the USA is wrong.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html

Maybe all the non-US patents are noneforceable, but that's at best unproven.

Software patents don't exist in most of the world

Posted Jan 28, 2010 14:53 UTC (Thu) by dion (guest, #2764) [Link]

Well, as the linked page says software patents are thankfully still illegal around here, but that's no reason not to avoid H.264, hardware vendors are still in as much of a jam as the US ones.