On Tuesday 09 July 2002 07:43, Doug McGarrett wrote:
o compete--(I'm obviouly not a lawyer)-and perhaps the Linux companies should join with Redhat in a joint action suit against whoever controls the DECSS. (Probably Microsoft.) But even with a billion-dollar corporation, it's possible
Nobody controls the DVDCSS library (although there are those who would love to). It is a free, open-source and GPL-ed piece of code developed by some clever guy in Norway who simply wanted to watch DVDs on his Linux machine without worrying about regional encoding. But according to the infamous "Digital Millennium Copyright Act", it is illegal to distribute this library in the US. This has been challanged in court, but without much success. Some Linux distributions outside the US do include it and so do the source-based distributions such as Gentoo, since they do not directly distribute the library, only supply a link to the library. Ladislav