Any links which explain the legal situation for "Linux distributions"?

• MP3 support now coming to Fedora Workstation 25

The enwiki article claims the last US patent on mp3 expires on 16 April 2017, though it's not referenced other than to the patents themselves.

Hi everyone! Wikimedia Legal has been analyzing this issue and we can provide you with an update once that it is done.

I've no issue in Commons supporting MP3 files, but if Legal is happy with the situation and support is to be turned on, could it be done with a suitable degree of planning, to allow the Commons community time to set up appropriate systems to identify and handle copyright violations.

In T162395#3172338, @Nick wrote:

I've no issue in Commons supporting MP3 files, but if Legal is happy with the situation and support is to be turned on, could it be done with a suitable degree of planning, to allow the Commons community time to set up appropriate systems to identify and handle copyright violations.

T132650: Copyright detection (acoustic fingerprint matching) for audio files

Note that with the TimedMediaHandler support now getting merged, enabling this in production will mean setting $wgTmhEnableMp3Uploads to true in CommonSettings.php.

Fedora has had decode support since 2016 and added encode support weeks ago. The format is Free now. I filed this so we could accept files as soon as possible—with or without legal approving a TimedMediaHandler backend.

We obviously won't accept uploads until legal signs off, regardless of the front end features. Have patience. :)

@brion I suggest we set wgTmhEnableMp3Uploads to false in WMF configurations, so that the rest of the world doesn't have to wait for Wikimedia..

Note that legal review is complete now, there doesn't seem to be any blocker.

The legal sign-off: T120288#3316046.