On 23/04/06 19:00, Bryan S. Tyson wrote:
On Sunday 23 April 2006 06:39 pm, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
As an aside, when did libDVDcss become legal in the United States?
It's obviously legal under the right circumstances since all living-room DVD players and Windows-based software players like Power DVD can play encrypted DVDs!
I wasn't aware that Windows or my DVD player (the one plugged into the TV, not the one in my computer) used libDVDcss. LibDVDcss is a codec library for Linux, not a general-purpose codec library. Microsoft and manufacturers of DVD players all licenced the codec from whoever owns the DVD/CSS patents, and implemented it in proprietary software, whereas the author of libDVDcss did not -- that library purports to be open source, which, if those patents have any validity to them whatsoever, is patently ridiculous.
If I can go out and buy PowerDVD to watch movies on my Windows computer, and that's legal, isn't it about time there was legal software to play movies on my Linux computer? How many years has it been, yet if we WANT to be legal, what software can we buy?
That I cannot help you with.
Till this absurd situation changes, I don't apologize for downloading libdvdcss. Well, *shhhhh* until it is legal, or you might find yourself on someone's terrorist watchlist ;)