DMCA Takedown

[jackofallgeeks]

So, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the current "big stick"
for copyright holders, and DMCA-takerdown notices are legal notices sent to
websites and service ptroviders 'requesting' that they take 'infringing'
content offline. The curious thing Here
is that Google took down an open source project, CoreAVC-for-Linux, because
of a DMCA-takedown and while CoreAVC is proprietary software for Windows,
CoreAVC-for-Linux just provides software patches which allow Linus OSes to
use CoreAVC without using any CoreAVC code. Now, it isn't said who
served the takedown notice so maybe someone who has a legitimate case is
involved, but I don't think the CoreAVC people have any place to call
infrongment if the app in question doesn't use their code. I'll keep
my ears perked for any developments here though given the nature of these
sorts of things, I don't expect to hear any).

Comments

[readiness.livejournal.com]

did you get my message? I'm sorry it was a little confusing - victoria was trying to help

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

I did get it, but I haven't been around to check the website you mentioned yet. What was the URL, for ease of reference?

[readiness.livejournal.com]

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/being_catholic/

[otakulk.livejournal.com]

Man I didn't hear that, thats such BS.

In fact, its just weird. I don't understand how the DMCA applies here. I think that article may be missing some things. First of all, I thought that H.264 is an open-standard format, but the standard doesn't tell anyone how to decode or encode it (hence different libraries, same thing happened to mpeg-4 with divx, xvid, etc). Maybe just MPEG-4 AVC was the open standard, but I use libx264, which is open-source, to play mpeg-4 avc stuff and I thought that was the same thing as H.264. Any thoughts?

I know microsoft had some proprietary AVC codec that was going to be used for new HD dvds (or was it blue ray?) I think it was code named MS-One? I'll have to check. Last year at google's summer of code someone wrote a ffmpeg-plugin to read it though, I wonder if that was the same thing? Hmm.. will investigate.

The really weird thing about that is I didn't think DCMA would apply here, but they certainly could make some claims to software patent infringement (which is also BS IMHO).

[otakulk.livejournal.com]

Oh okay I looked it up. H.264 is just the MPEG-AVC standard, CoreAVC was popular because it was the fastest decoder around (really Fing Fast). It uses multi-threads so hyperthreading and dual core chips can play high-def video. CoreAVC's complaint was that the open-source project reverse engineered their software, and that was a violation of DMCA. They then apologized, and it will be back soon!