Delirium wrote:
Debian's legal team is pretty conservative
(read: paranoid) on these matters, and Debian currently includes
mp3-playback software in the main distribution (package 'xmms', among
others). Mp3-encoding software is not part of Debian due to patent
issues, but playback software is, so it seems their legal team has
determined there aren't any problems with playback.
How recent is the distribution you're referring to? As evidenced by
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/openletter.html, the MP3 decoding patent
has only been enforced for less than two years now.