40 lines
1.9 KiB
HTML
40 lines
1.9 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Speex and patents</title>
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<meta name="author" content="Jean-Marc Valin">
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</head>
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<body>
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<div align="center">
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<h1>Position regarding patents</h1>
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<div align="left">The goal of Speex is to provide a codec that is open-source
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(released under the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html">LGPL</a>)
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and that can be used in open-source software. This implies that it also has
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to be free from patent restrictions. Unfortunately, the field of speech coding
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known to be a real patent minefield and to make the matter worse, each country
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has its own patent laws and list of granted patents so tracking them all
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would be next to impossible. This is why we cannot provide an absolute warranty
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that Speex is indeed completely patent-free.<br>
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<br>
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That being said, we are doing our best to keep away from known patents and
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we do not patent the algorithms we use. That's about all we can do about it.
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If you are aware of a patent issue with Speex, please <a
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href="mailto:speex-devel@lists.sourceforge.net">let us know</a>.<br>
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<br>
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Normally there shouldn't be any problem when you use Speex. However for the
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reasons explained above, if you are thinking about using Speex commercially,
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we strongly suggest that you have a closer look at patent issues with respect
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to your country. Note that this is not specific to Speex, since many "standardized"
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codecs have an unclear patent status (like <a
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href="http://www.mp3-tech.org/patents.html">MP3</a>, <a
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href="http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/%7Ejutta/toast.html">GSM</a> and probably
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others), not to mention the risks of a previously unknown patent holder claiming
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rights on a standardized codec long after standardization (<a href="http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/Gif.html">GIF</a>, <a href="http://www.itworld.com/Man/2687/020719jpegpatent/">JPEG</a>).<br>
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</div>
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</div>
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</body>
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</html>
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