Legal update

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

I've gotten some legal updates that I know some people have been waiting
for:

libgpod/gtkpod support for newer ipods: Legal says that we can
incorporate this code, it does not violate the DMCA, because it is
solely for the purposes of interoperability.

This means that we can go ahead and enable support for new ipods in
Fedora.

*****

Linking to "third party repositories": Legal says that we can link, from
the Fedora website, to third party repositories, so long as no one has
made a critical assessment to determine that a patent or patents cover
the technology in question and no party has actually asserted their
patents against the technology, we should be okay. Once we are on notice
of a claim of infringement or are aware of a competent assessment that
concludes infringement is likely, we would need to take the link down or
run a serious risk of facing a claim for inducing infringement.  Merely
linking would be highly unlikely to subject us to a claim of direct
infringement. I asked about MP3, and it was stated that unless we are
specifically aware of the MP3 patent holders asserting a claim against
the technology, we are still okay.

This means that we can put a page up on the fedoraproject.org wiki,
which carefully explains that there is an optional addon repository
called Livna, which contains packages that for a variety of reasons, are
not included in the normal Fedora repositories. We should not specify
these reasons, and if someone asserted their patents against something
in Livna, we would need to take the page down. We can link to Livna
directly on this page. We cannot ship yum configs which enable Livna
(but Livna provides these, so we don't really need to).

*****

As a reminder, if you have legal issues related to Fedora, please let me
know, and I'll do my best to get them resolved.

Thanks,

~spot