Re: Licensing issue: Emms has been offered support to read the metadata for SNES SPC files. OK with Emacs?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > It is OK for free software to play proprietary formats, as long as
  > patents do not affect the ability to redistribute and use that software.

This question is more complex than it might seem.  Many things in
software are covered by patents, but many of those patents are not in
fact enforced, or not enforced against free software.  Many of them
have lapsed.

Indeed, to find out whether patents exist on any given method is a lot of
work, and lawyers aay you're better off not knowing.

So what we do in practice is, if we don't see threats being made against
free software, we treat it as "safe enough".

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)