There is nothing wrong in reading patented formats... as long as you read them with Free Softwares (e.g., gnash or swfdec for Flash, OpenOffice for .doc, Fluendo for MP3, etc.)! BLAG Linux And GNU provides, out of the box, Free codecs to read most patented formats. With gNewSense you need to install them with APT. This is not a "bug". In Europe, patents are not even legal... and that is an excellent thing! Software patents do not make any sense. They hinder inovation. They are a threat to Free Software (to any software in fact). Indeed, any big software uses thousands of "ideas". Each of them is potentially covered by a patent. Even the most trivial idea may be patented. For instance, a very recent patent covers "linking an image to a Web page". Should we stop using Apache which implements such a "clever" functionality?

Interestingly, here is what Brian Brazil (one of the gNewSense creators) wrote on the Gobuntu mailing list :
"> 2007/8/1, Brian Brazil :
> > Here's an exercise. Prove that the following program is fully free
> > (assume say GPLv3) and patent-unencumbered:
> > #include
> > int main(void){
> > printf ("Hello world");
> > return 0;
> > }
>
> First, one cannot prove that a program is free if there's no copyright
> notice upon it, declaring that it is released under a particular
> license.

I said to assume GPLv3 :)

> Second, there is nothing in this piece of code which could be
> patented. It is a standard main function in the C language, with the
> execution of a standard function (printf). One cannot even say that
> this program is dependant upon the GNU C library, because "stdio.h" is
> a standard header file, which could be included from another C
> library.

Few random thoughts (doing patent searches is bad, so I haven't done any):
"Method and process to pass data between processes" (return code)
"Use of unconditional jumps to reduce code size via reusable sections"
(functions)
"Method and process to combine files via a method of textual
substitution" (header files)
"Method and process to delimit related code that may be entered and
exited from multiple points" (parsing of the function braces)
"Method and process to convert human readable text to an efficient
binary representation" (compiler)
"A mechanism for data interchange via standard representation of
letters" (ASCII)

That's the tip of the iceberg of some the patents that a simple chunk
of code like this could fall under.

> If this piece of code could be patented, then the whole C language
> could be patented and one could not write any piece of code in the C
> language without being patent-encumbered.

That's pretty much my point. This example is a bit extreme, but the
principle applies more generally.

Brian"

Naturally, I always produce publically specified and, as much as possible, patent-free formats (PDF, ODT, PNG, SVG, OGG, etc.). In this way, if I share a file, my recipient is free to choose the application to read/edit it. In a world where every sofware is Free, every format is necessarelly Free as well (the source code defines how the format is to be read). This allows a real competition thanks to a real interoperability.

I switched to gNewSense as soon as version 2 was released. I do not know what formats you are talking about but gNewSense can read any mp3, mpeg2, xvid, wmv, etc. Even better, when attempting to read such a file the first time, it indicates you the missing packages so that you can fix the problem in two clicks.
Alternatively you can install all these codecs by searching gstreamer inside Synaptic.

Regarding flash contents, you should try sfwdec-mozilla instead. With it, Epiphany perfectly reads the videos from YouTube. ;-)