- Saturday, 14 November 2009
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If you can't bite, don't show your teeth - Yiddish proverb
DMCA complaint prompts Google to take down open source project
GOOGLE HAS YET AGAIN succumbed to the malevolent will of the all-seeing, all powerful DMCA, and has taken down an open source project which allowed a high-definition video decoder called CoreAVC to run on Linux systems.
In a very succinct statement, the search engine giant acknowledged the take-down, saying "In response to a complaint we received under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed project 'coreavc-for-linux'".
The Windows codec, CoreAVC, is a video decoder which was developed by a company called CoreCodec, especially for decoding the MPEG-4 AVC (or H.264) video format. It is thought to be amongst the fastest software decoders in existence, rivaling even hardware decoders.
There are only currently two versions of the codec available, both for Windows, one which costs $7.95 and the other more advanced version which costs $14.95.
Since a Linux version was not available, Google had been leading an open source initiative to create patches for the codec, which allowed it to then work on certain Linux apps like mplayer, for instance.
The DMCA was invoked to get Google to take down the CoreAVC-for-Linux project on grounds that it had been "reverse engineering without permission", according to CoreCodec's president and CEO, Dan Marlin. But Marlin hinted that this may be only a temporary measure, as his company is in discussions for legalizing a version of the codec for linux users, coming soon. He just wants them to pay for it like Windows users already do.
So, it appears that today the DMCA has won yet another victory while free open sauce had chalked up yet another sad death. µ
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Why do you want to play a video on a PC anyway? I know allot is the challenge of it all but Is that not why we have such nice LCD TVs for? My PS3 will do me just fine for any HD crap.
"So, it appears that today the DMCA has won yet another victory while free open sauce had chalked up yet another sad death"

No, the DMCA has been used in an appropriate way. Google should have had the legal nous and common sense to have contacted CoreCodec before reverse-engineering their product. Instead, they broke the law.

CoreCodec has every right to control the distribution and income from their product. I have no doubt that, as the story implies, CC used the DMCA takedown in order to make Google do what they should have done in the first place.

Open Source doesn't mean "no pay, no rules", and never did.
After many of years of development fully opensource video codec Dirac and its first implementation Schrödinger have been available as 1.x release for couple of month already.

And Dirac is designed to be of the same quality level as MPEG4 codecs.

So all who are fed up with proprietary videocodecs and all the mess therein should start using, promoting, pushing, ... etc Dirac and its applications.
Next time you post a story from good ol' Slash of Dot, you may want to skim all the threads.

A linked to forum of CoreAVC (the company) had this official reply...

Update.... The DMCA removal request and the project reinstatement was sent to Google yesterday 5/4. I'd like to publically apologize to Alan for the disconnect between him and us as well as the disruption to the project as there was no ill will intended and we were already working on a resolution with him before this went public. Having counsel at times and what advise they give is sometimes not in the best interests as was this case and we thank Alan for his understanding.

Turning the focus back... there is obviously a general need for CoreAVC on Linux. Now we can go about this in several ways.

- GStreamer Plug-in
- MPlayer wrapped DLL
- Library version

We are evaluating the possibilities of each but we already have GStreamer Plug-in ready to launch. We are also looking at releasing CorePlayer Professional for Linux (QT Version) but we need to package this up for distribution.
I dont quite get the problem - corecodec invented the code, they want to make money from it, google wants to make it opensource, i.e. free, then inventor objects.

if google wants to let linux users decode H264 fast, then they can invent their on fast software decoder.

<a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080505-corecodec-apologizes-for-wrongful-google-dmca-takedown.html">...not</a>
Regulas says

>> Why do you want to play a video on a PC anyway?

He probably visited the site on his PS3 as well...

Enough said...