Live from the Nuke Free Zone

The MPlayer project
replaced its home page in protest of the European Commission’s support
for software patents:

This site has been shut down because of numerous patent violations
in MPlayer. The other free software multimedia players are next.

Multimedia is a patent minefield. All important techniques and formats
are covered by broad and trivial patents that are harming progress and
alternative implementations, such as free software multimedia players.

Actually, MPlayer’s site hasn’t been “shut down”, but aside the melodrama
there is a major threat to software development by the European Union’s
consideration of software patents, and the media player market is
a great example of this.

MPlayer is the only serious solution for playing video on alternative
operating systems like Linux and
FreeBSD
The other players, in my experience —
xine,
vlc,
kaffeine,
and the rest — just don’t work on most media files, and there are
a few that even MPlayer won’t run. This is probably directly due
to MPlayer’s use of patented video and audio routines, which is not
strictly patent infringement since there are no software patents
in Hungary. That is probably why MPlayer isn’t in US-based Linux
distributions, but the MPlayer programmers aren’t software pirates.
In fact, the MPlayer programmers are serious about respect for intellectual
property law, and too many patents these days are
overly broad or cover
ideas which
don’t deserve to be patented [PDF].

The cost of acquiring permission to the patented routines used
by video creators creates a high financial barrier to entry
that only a commercial software developer, or one in a country
where such patents are not enforced, can surpass. Currently, there is
little opportunity for even commercial competition
when Microsoft, a company with more than enough capital to support
a fully licensed product, delivers its Windows Media Player for free
with its monopoly Windows operating system, and the market share of
other operating systems is so small as to make the cost of a fully
licensed media player for them prohibitive to the consumer.

The most disturbing aspect of the situation is the manner in which
the European Council violated
its own procedures in order to push through its support for software
patents over the opposition of several member states. This show of
authoritarianism in support of a few powerful business interests
is starting to raise questions in Europe about whether the current form
of pan-European government is really in Europeans’ best interests.