[XviD-devel] License/legal discussions

[Christoph Lampert]

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, charact3r wrote:
> 2. GPL requires that if you pay to license a patent,
> you must be prepared to pay to license that patent for
> _ALL_ potential users of your redistributed code - I
> doubt you are this rich ;-)
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This doesn't stand anywhere is GPL. 

GPL forbids to include algorithms that are under patent, unless they are
free to use for everybody. There isn't anything about "paying for
users" or so. 
If the patent isn't valid everywhere, you can explicitly exclude the
countries where the patents are valid. That's the way XVID does at the
moment, by excluding the US and Japan. 

gruel