It is just a Linux utility to play DVDs and CDs without copy capabilities. While it will play downloaded video and sound files, Or self made content, I would think that a little self policing about where you source those would be on you to do or not do with protected content?
I am having trouble exactly understanding the full issue I guess. Every car will allow you to drive intoxicated. But does this mean you should never get a car because it will? Or just use a car with moral self responsibly? It is just a universal tool. How you use that tool is up to you right?
As far as i understand it, on the defensible side software patents are about trying to ensure that those who write code, and labor to make sure it works, and those who produce it, get paid for their labor. And thus the ability to even decode a DVD is licensed in that interest. Otherwise potentially one could write and or play and or produce a song and and sell one copy, only to see it uploaded for all the world to receive for free. While I do not support Christian ministries criminalizing the distribution of free, attributed, material yet the laborer is worthy of his pay. (cf. Luke 10:7; 1 Timothy 5:18) And thank God for the good of both, yet far more evil is protected, while works that are over 70 years after the death of the copyright holder are public domain, unless somehow bought up by another.
A main issue as regards music and videos in the interest of the above is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMA) which makes it illegal to bypass any technology, such as digital rights management software, meant to protect copyrighted material. Using or selling technology that allows access to material in a way that violates copyright is also illegal." - https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-digital-millennium-copyright-act-explained
And from Fedora: What is a software patent? A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a government to a patent holder for a limited period of time, usually 20 years from the earliest effective filing date of the patent application. These monopoly rights are granted to patent applicants in exchange for their disclosure of the invention claimed by the patent. Once a patent is granted in a given country, the patent holder may exclude someone from making, using, selling or importing embodiments of the claimed invention in that country. Software patents are different from copyright or trademarks despite being lumped together with them under the collective term Intellectual Property.
A codec is a set of methods to encode and decode video or audio information into a data stream. In the case of codecs like MP3 or WMV, the company or companies associated with developing the format are also involved in asserting (or restrictively licensing) patents that purportedly cover the format; we refer to such codecs as "patent encumbered". Other codecs, such as WebM, Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis, Dirac, and FLAC, are made available by their developers without asserting patents on their implementations; we refer to such codecs as "patent unencumbered". Fedora includes comprehensive support for open, patent-unencumbered codecs but is unable to include support for the patent encumbered ones.
Patent licenses usually require the licensee to pay royalties based on the number of users. Since Fedora is free and open source software, the effective number of users is essentially unrestricted. Patent holders are generally unwilling to give a blanket patent license for unlimited use; moreover, the royalty payments would be too high for it to be practical for the Fedora Project, or its sponsors, to pay them. Proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Windows include the costs of third-party patent licenses paid by Microsoft in the pricing of the product as sold to end users. Fedora is not sold commercially, so there is no way to recoup these substantial expenses.
Even if funds were available to do so, such royalty-bearing patent licenses would have to be compatible with the free/open source software licenses governing the software covered by the patent license. In practice this is usually challenging. For example, the most widely-used FOSS licenses (GPL and LGPL) place constraints on the ability of distributors to distribute software under benefit of third-party patent licenses. Even if the software in question is placed under some other license, distributing such software under benefit of a patent license may make the software effectively non-free and thus incompatible with Fedora legal policies.
. For every copy of Microsoft Windows that you buy, or every DVD player that is sold, a portion of that cost goes directly to pay patent licenses; in fact, for DVD players, it can be over a quarter of the final cost . And, since that patent license applies to every copy in use, it's one of the reasons why you are not allowed to freely copy and redistribute software such as Microsoft Windows (although, to be sure, even if software patents did not exist, Microsoft would be unlikely to make Windows free software).
Fedora, however, has a public promise to always be freely redistributable by anyone. That is why Fedora cannot include support for patented media formats - it would break this redistribution promise. This means that, out of the box, you can't directly play media files such as Windows Media, MPEG-4 video, or MP3 audio. Fedora supports open media formats such as WebM or Ogg Vorbis and Theora , which are freely implementable and usable by anyone without a patent license.
Note that Fluendo offers a MP3 plugin for the Gstreamer multimedia framework (used by Totem, Rhythmbox and other multimedia applications) for free and other codecs and DVD player for a price that includes patent licenses. Fedora does not include or endorse these options but you can choose to use them with Fedora if you want to. - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Software_Patents
As for File types supported by Windows Media Player,
Windows Media formats (.asf, .wma, .wmv, .wm) Windows Media Metafiles (.asx, .wax, .wvx, .wmx, wpl) Microsoft Digital Video Recording (.dvr-ms) Windows Media Download Package (.wmd) Audio Visual Interleave (.avi) Moving Pictures Experts Group (.mpg, .mpeg, .m1v, .mp2, .mp3, .mpa, .mpe, .m3u) Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.mid, .midi, .rmi) Audio Interchange File Format (.aif, .aifc, .aiff) Sun Microsystems and NeXT (.au, .snd) Audio for Windows (.wav) CD Audio Track (.cda) Indeo Video Technology (.ivf) Windows Media Player Skins (.wmz, .wms) QuickTime Movie file (.mov) MP4 Audio file (.m4a) MP4 Video file (.mp4, .m4v, .mp4v, .3g2, .3gp2, .3gp, .3gpp) Windows audio file (.aac, .adt, .adts) MPEG-2 TS Video file (.m2ts) Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac)
Needed: Media Feature Pack for N and KN versions of Windows 10
For Linux: https://fluendo.com/en/products/enterprise/fluendo-codec-pack/
And in general,
Patents arose as a legal mechanism designed to protect ‘intellectual capital’; that is, to protect the ideas of inventors from being used by others without permission and/or compensation. It was recognized early on that if one wished to provide incentive to innovators, that not all inventors had the means to implement, develop or even produce their invention at the time it was conceived. Without some kind of protection, inventors were reluctant to aggressively pursue their ideas, much less share them with others that might prefer stealing the idea to sharing the glory. And, as a general rule, people often scoff at new ideas until someone proves they are useful, which usually requires someone to invest significant resources such as time, money and effort. In theory, patents provide a valuable protection system for inventors pursuing development of their invention as well as a reward system for commercially valuable ideas. Modern-day patents, however, are not always of such a noble nature and software patents, a relatively new concept, are becoming more of an issue in bioinformatics (Lesavich, 2000). These patents may eventually wind up as landmines in the path of progress, as there is now clearly a divergence between theory and reality...
I would argue that software patents are not inherently evil, and that the potential for profit provides more motivation to pursue the realization of a powerful idea than academic considerations alone. Thus, software patents should not be abolished, but the system reformed. - https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/22/13/1543/194298
But then we have this,
Microsoft makes its 60,000 patents open source to help Linux 29 comments The company is joining the Open Invention Network to protect Linux By Chaim Gartenberg@cgartenberg Oct 10, 2018,
Microsoft announced today that it’s joining the Open Invention Network (OIN), an open-source patent group designed to help protect Linux from patent lawsuits. In essence, this makes the company’s library over 60,000 patents open source and available to OIN members, via ZDNet. - https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17959978/microsoft-makes-its-60000-patents-open-source-to-help-linux
Hope this helps. http://peacebyjesus.net