-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Martin Sommer wrote:
On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Andreas Simon wrote:
On Tuesday 04 October 2005 09:54, Pascal Bleser wrote:
So, to summarize: libdvdcss2 is (L)GPL, but infringes patents because they break the conditions by which you are allowed to play encrypted DVDs. Apart from any patents libdvdcss2 circumvents a copy-protection of music data media. The ownership, distribution, or usage of such copy-protection circumventions is also illegal in some countries due to the law on copyright (You already made the example of the german c't magazine which got sued because of a mere hyperlink to such a circumvention).
Heise got sued because in the new copyright law of Germany, not only ownership, distribution and usage are forbidden but even also to provide any information about how one can circumvent a copy-protection. And distributing a link is such an information.
Yep. This is sick indeed but.. it could also mean, by extent, that providing information on the
openSUSE wiki on how to install such software would be illegal (at least in Germany).
And probably also to write an installer that grabs libdvdcss2 from source and builds it.
To everyone: so please, keep such potential issues in mind when you contribute documentation on the
openSUSE wiki. e.g. writing a page that explains how to enable all the MP3 and similar stuff is to
be thought about with great care.
This is bad for end-users but... blame the industry and the possibly stupid laws, not us.
Use Ogg/Vorbis and Theora.
That MP3 and DVD topic is an always recurring one, as well on this list as on the #opensuse IRC
channel, and you always get that "SUSE sucks it doesn't ship MP3, but other distros do" (which is
not true, btw) in your face, again and again explaining the same stuff all over, mostly to people
who are not much aware (to say the least) of what copyrights, patents and patent licenses really mean.
Could a few of us write up a page on the openSUSE wiki to explain the situation, once for all ?
I'm not really an expert on that topic but I have been sitting in a few talks about it ;),
nevertheless not sufficient to write up a bullet-proof explanation.
Maybe we could start with my previous mail in this thread, and compliment it with the useful
additions of Andreas and Martin, and have it cross-read by a few other people who do have expertise
in that area (possible from Novell as well).
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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