Created attachment 182342 [details] lame patent/license cleanup From https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated." Linux distributions, in particular Fedora are now enabling MP3 enconding so I think we can follow. Add LICENSE while here.
There are still 2 valid patents: - 5,703,999: Expires: December 30, 2017 - 5,924,060: Expires: August 29, 2017 fedora started distributing long ago, so is debian, but because they decided to ship it anyway and only restrict it again if they get threaten iirc;
(In reply to Baptiste Daroussin from comment #1) Interesting, thanks. According to Google, at least the first one (5,703,999) is also owned by Fraunhofer so the license statement covers it (there is basically no way to license it anymore). I guess we may have to wait until August 29 to be absolutely safe.
Both patents seem to be owned by the same authors, so I suspect Fedora is going a reasonably safe path, however IANAL and I don't plan to become one so I think we should wait at least until after the next release.