Multimedia Codecs: The Legal Path
If the American government invested as many resources rounding up violators of software licenses as it does fighting “terror” (and no, I don’t mean the Jacobin variety), I’d have been put away long ago, because all of my Ubuntu systems use patented multimedia software that I didn’t pay for. But I’ve recently realized that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that legal codec support is easily available. Here’s a look at some of those options.
Last week, we wrote about multimedia patents and their place within the free-software ecosystem. As almost anyone who’s installed Ubuntu knows, the operating system doesn’t ship with patented multimedia codecs by default due to legal issues.
For most people, however, installing software to play MP3s and DVDs is simple enough. In many cases, the system automatically prompts users to download the fully functional but legally ambiguous gstreamer-ugly plugins from Ubuntu’s repositories the first time they try to play media compressed using proprietary algorithms. Where relevant, the pop-ups warn that using the software may be illegal in certain jurisdictions, but that hasn’t stopped anyone I know from clicking “OK”.
So chances are good that if you use Ubuntu for listening to music or watching videos, and you live in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan or any other country whose legal codes frown upon violation of software patents, you’re breaking the law, maybe without realizing it.
If you’re like me, this may not bother you very much. There are much worse laws to break, after all.
Fluendo
But if you run a business, local government or other organization that can’t so easily disregard intellectual property laws, you have to think twice before installing patented multimedia codecs onto your Ubuntu system.
Fortunately for the growing number of organizations that deploy Ubuntu on their workstations, however, the gstreamer-ugly plugins are not the only way to enable patented multimedia playback. Fluendo, a company based in Barcelona, offers legal codecs for a variety of patented formats, including MP3, MPEG2, MPEG4, H264, AAC, WMV and WMA.
Fluendo’s products, some of which are available in the Canonical store, are targeted at businesses and local governments that deploy Ubuntu and need legal support for popular multimedia formats, but are also available for individual use. They range from MP3, codecs, which are free, to support for DVD playback.
Fluendo also develops its own media center application, called Fluoh. Its codecs, however, will work with any gstreamer-compatible player, which includes most of those available in the Ubuntu repositories.
Why it matters
With most jurisdictions still lax about violations of software patents by Linux users, who remain a quantatively negligible group, the popularity of products like Fluendo’s may be limited. But as Ubuntu’s user base grows, especially in the workplace, legal solutions for multimedia playback will become more and more important.
Legal alternatives to the gstreamer-ugly plugins are also crucial for demonstrating that Ubuntu is not a community of freeloaders and lawbreakers, as many opponents of the free-software movement often make it out to be. Overcoming this negative image is essential if Ubuntu hopes to receive more attention from developers who traditionally work outside the open-source ecosystem.
Admittedly, I do my fair share of freeloading, and even lawbreaking, from time to time. In spite of people like me, however, there are lot of Ubuntu users who are willing and eager to pay for software. Solutions like Fluendo’s are increasingly important in meeting their needs.
FYI: OpenSolaris comes with legit codecs free of charge.
@milkman: I seriously doubt that. Many frequently used codecs legally costs money, and there’s no way any company can afford to give them away for free.
@Fred: Well as far as I know OpenSUSE comes with mp3 playback out of the box, they have a contract with a company in kind of the sameway as adobe has with it’s adobe flash player. The distributor pays up huge some of money to a company like Fluendo, than they ship with the non-free codecs by default.
Interestingly, even good ol’ Microsoft doesn’t package DVD codecs. Over the festive period of ’09 my daughter wanted to play her DVD gifts on her new Windows 7 laptop (she needs it for her Uni, they frown upon Linux and say its not compatible with their network). In order for me to play them with Media Player, I first had to purchase the correct DVD codecs for a whopping £19.99 (GBP)!
Easy way round was to download VLC and she was away. So, even paid for OS’s don’t come with all the codecs out of the box.
As an aside, the Uni’s servers are all Linux based, go figure 😉
You could make it clearer, even though indirectly stating it, that we’re talking about US law here. Patent claims are to weak or totally unfounded in other parts of the world; have you purchased the media legally then you’ve got the right to use and the codecs used become irrelevant.
Fluendo codecs are of great quality. I’m using them for some time and can recommend them if you need legal codecs. Complete Set of Playback Plugins is a winner… well almost… Problem is, that with these codecs you cannot rip music in Rhythmbox or Banshee to MP3 format, only OGG, what is not the case if you install package “ubuntu-restricted-extras” which install all possible gstreamer plugins and w32codecs. And therefore if you think that buying Fluendo codecs will give you all functions that you need you can be unpleasantly suprised 🙁
Btw. How is standing VLC media player in violating of software licenses?
I’m in hope that HTML5 ends up with using Ogg Vorbis to raise the awareness of this format and maybe help give a nudge to remove the reliance on some of these non-free formats.
OpenSUSE includes MP3 playback by using Helix Banshee which, as they put it;
“Helix Banshee uses any codecs and plugins found in RealPlayer or Helix Player installations, so it’s best suited for users that want a no-hassle way to play and manage music in Linux. “
KimTjik, you’re correct this applies especial in the US, but also in the UK and Germany. Regarding Spain it will probably be the same as in the US as soon as new legislation is passed at the end of the semester.
“So chances are good that if you use Ubuntu for listening to music or watching videos, and you live in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan or any other country whose legal codes frown upon violation of software patents, you’re breaking the law, maybe without realizing it.”
United Kingdom law does not allow the patenting of software, so it isn’t an issue, as there are no patents to violate. I’m not certain about the other countries, but I was under the impression that the US and Japan are the only countries in which software is generally patentable.
The media center by Fluendo is not Fluoh but Moovida.
[…] makes it spread patents and stifle standards. GNU/Linux doesn#8217;t need any of this trouble, as it was put right here yesterday: With most jurisdictions still lax about violations of software patents by Linux users, who remain […]
@Paull Lockett
“United Kingdom law does not allow the patenting of software”
Read the Symbian decision, it was about a DLL loaded in a phone that was consuming less battery.
The judge said that a better piece of code was patentable if it was reducing power consumption.
@pastebin
The Symbian decision is a good point to raise. I think it was a bad decision, as a result of an overly lax interpretation of the rules, which viewed it not as a patent on a piece of software as such, but as being in the grey area between software and the operation of a computer as a computer.
In any case, it shouldn’t worry people looking for codecs, as patents have never been granted on them.
Lucky I’m not American nor need to live or travel there ever, and my country is openly against American foreign policies. Fact is you can’t sign any kind of “free trade” agreement with the States without using their laws, and in fact giving priority to their laws over yours. So this concept of software patents is sooner or later going to be imposed in most of Europe.
I do understand the concept, and how the corporations expect it to work. A Codec license must be paid, there is a cheaper one for playback and a expensive one for encoding. You can pay either a huge annual unlimited copies fee, or per copy basis. The software itself does not infringe this, it is you as individual living in one of those oppressed regimes who do, the moment you decide to play or encode. Doesn’t matter if you made your own player/encoder or used someone else’s.
Usually large corporations like Microsoft pay the annual license fee and provide you the software already paid. A free software effort like LAME can’t do this for you, instead you can try arrange an agreement with the patent holder (in the mp3 case, that would be Thompson). Now do this with each and every codec… Most won’t let individuals any sort of pay agreement, and will only talk with other companies for bulk licensing.
I think Fluendo, being smaller goes the per-copy payment, and playback only. Remember you are not paying for the software but for the license to playback that codec, so in theory you could still use ugly, VLC or mplayer (for playback, and only the codecs covered by Fluendo) legally after purchasing; but since those large corporations dictate and change laws at will YMMV.
Many parts of the world will simply never accept software patents and can simply ignore this, but attention must be paid if you hear any sort of “Free Trade Agreement” going on as the States never sign agreements without forcing local law changes to enforce theirs over yours!
I have fetched the free Fluendo codecs for use on Linux and find them very helpful. I’d like to thank Fluendo for this opportunity to use their product free of charge. Should a fee someday be needed, I’d be very inclined to support this open source friendly vendor.
Thanks Very Much Fluendo, jackc….
First of all, software patents are still not enforcable in Europe and I hope it stays that way, so I am pretty confident you can take UK and Germany off your list.
Secondly, even if the jurisdiction were to change to the worse, there is only one major player representing patent pools in codecs: The MPEG LA. And they made it pretty clear that they do whatever is a financial benefit to their patent holders. Going after free software projects does give them bad reputation, legal costs and hardly any money to gain. So why should they do it?
I really think that paying for codecs on the private PC is anticipatory obedience which is uncalled for. Obedience to laws which are both senseless and not enforcable (no, the police is not gonna raid your PC to search for patent violations). So my advice is to go ahead, use ffmpeg and any of the wrappers and players around it like gstreamer-ugly, VLC, MPlayer and Xine. And don’t forget to tell people that software patents are a bad thing.
When I bought the first generation of Eee PC, it had the Xandros Linux with ffmpeg installed, with the complete list of codecs. So if even a commercial entity like Asus can get away with it, I am sure the home user can too.
As an interesting point that you didn’t mention, Fluendo’s codecs (or some, anyway) are Open Source, but IIRC, the patent license is only for binaries, so even something as simple as a recompilation of a codec you paid for to work on a different architecture is “illegal” in some countries. Bah… stupid software patents…
Fluendo did a good job here. I use their codec pack for two or three years now. The patent system is designed that it is impossible to pass it if you want to be legal. And I want to.
However, there could and should be way more support of being legal in Ubuntu. The notice: “May be illegal in your country” is a very bad way of doing things.
It is not so hard to generate a database about the legal states of the media codecs in different jurisdictions. And the user is giving her location during system installation. So it is relatively easy to provide the accurate information about the legal state of a particular codec. And therefore it is also relative easy to give easily followable legal ways to users in jurisdictions where patents are in effect. (This could even push Canonicals’ sales of the Fluendo Codec Pack – because there are many-many users who does not want to break the law intently.)
When I say relative easy I mean relative easy for a small group of people willing to do it. It could be finished in a month.
@Gergely:
Yes, Canonical could do that, but the problem is that, depending on how they phrased things, it could well be (and would be) construed as providing legal advice, which is, I’m sure, something that they really don’t want to worry about. I agree that the message is kind of bad, though. Maybe they should put a note saying something to the effect of “if you’re unsure, Fluendo provides…”. Part of the problem is, though, that people aren’t used to paying for things like codecs, because in other systems, they’re payed for by a company which is big enough to just build the price into their other products, even if the one in question is gratis. Ubuntu doesn’t look good by having a “this may be illegal” message, but I think that a lot of people would be confused if they just got this “totally free OS” that is now asking them to fork out ~$37 to play their songs; it’s entirely reasonable, but it’s also entirely backwards for someone coming from Windows or Mac OS.
Another issue is that while using patent-encumbered software without a license may be technically illegal in your country, saying it so bluntly at installation can be scary to users who don’t understand the rationale and implications. The effort to allow the consumer an informed choice (the click-through warning) may actually achieve the opposite; I’m not saying that the consumer *shouldn’t* be warned, but simply that not installing FFMPEG on their family computer because they think the police are going to break down their door is not what I’d consider an informed decision either. At the very least, Being Scary may leave the customer with less confidence in their software.