[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 1/2] opus_pvq: add resynth support and band encoding cost function

[wm4]

On Sat, 15 Apr 2017 15:53:36 +0200
"Jean-Baptiste Kempf" <jb at videolan.org> wrote:

> > Recently, I contacted the same author about relicensing the
> > same MPlayer code (of which af_pan.c was a subset of) to LGPL, and he
> > explicitly denied relicensing. So if I had been cehoyos, I probably
> > wouldn't shut up about how FFmpeg violates copyrights (fortunately I'm
> > not cehoyos). I think nowadays af_pan.c certainly does not violate the
> > original author's copyright though, because absolutely all code was
> > removed/replaced.  
> 
> Rewriting based on the same ideas also does not change the copyright.
> It is a derivative work under the Berne convention.
> I know it's not cool, but that's the international IP laws.

Well, that's not good. I bet this happened a lot when libswscale was
relicensed from GPL to LGPL. (But I don't have specific cases at hand.)

I'm fairly sure that ideas themselves are not copyrightable, though.