The Multimedia Question

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/19/07, David Boles <dgboles at gmail.com> wrote:
> Be careful what you offer to provide a 'lead to' or a 'go here for this'.
> Truly. Most, surely *not* all, of the people that want these types of
> codecs and plugins to play, for example, mp3 music files or DVDs movies,
> will be using these to listen to and play pirated (Bittorrent) music and
> movies. And most, again surely not all, would be more than happy to
> steal/violate/'call it whatever you wish' to be able to do so.
>
> Do you really want to promote that?

Let me humbly suggest that the cat is already out of the bag on this
issue. PLAYING the media isn't the problem in your argument,
DOWNLOADING content is the fundamental action which potentially
infringes copyright, and we very much allow that since we previously
made a policy decision to allow bittorrent and other p2p networking
clients into Fedora, which moots this line of argument completely.
There's absolutely no rational/moral/legal basis for desiring to
protect playback of material on the grounds that it might have been
obtained illegally if we are including the download tools already.

The only valid question here is how far are we willing to go to help
users interact data housed in proprietary formats.

-jef