this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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AFAIK european laws only allow to patent "inventions". Software is considered to be a series of "words" in whatever programming language you're using and, like sentences, it's not an invention and can't be patented.
On the other hand, software-assisted inventions can be patented as a whole.
With that said, software can still be considered a "work" protected by copyright laws.
And that's fine. VLC does their own implementation of codecs so that's not an issue. It's the patents that make it an issue.