Delirium wrote:
Debian's legal team is pretty conservative (read: paranoid) on these matters, and Debian currently includes mp3-playback software in the main distribution (package 'xmms', among others). Mp3-encoding software is not part of Debian due to patent issues, but playback software is, so it seems their legal team has determined there aren't any problems with playback.
How recent is the distribution you're referring to? As evidenced by http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/openletter.html, the MP3 decoding patent has only been enforced for less than two years now.