Will VLC survive?

Everyone knows about VideoLAN and their free software VLC which can play about any kind of video format you throw at it. It cold soon disappear, thanks to the new European software patents directive.

In fact, not just VLC is threatened. Many free software libraries and other projects VLC depends on could be forced to retirement. And this will affect other free players too.

The problem is that big corporations have patented about every methods that you can use to encode and decode video data. Until now, these patents where recognized only in the United States. So they where irrelevant to programmers elsewhere, like in Europe.

Two interesting links:

• EU: Software Patents vs Parliamentary Democracy
• Software Patents: An Industry at Risk - Talking about software patents in the US.

I’m glad there is no such thing in Canada, up to now at least…