Legal Status of libdvdcss

[Matthew East]

Hello Sounder,

I'm writing a section on enabling dvd support for the Ubuntu Desktop
Guide for Dapper. A question occurred to me while doing this, which is
about the precise legal difficulties with libdvdcss.

The debian README says this:

"Due to legal problems, Debian cannot
distribute libdvdcss, but it is available on other places on the
internet.  If it is legal for you to use css, you can run
'/usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh' at any time to
download and install it."

This implies vaguely that in some cases it may not be legal for users to
install the library. There is some discussion from debian-legal here[1].

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=223961

But, the wikipedia article says:

"In many countries it is forbidden to sell or document programs that
provide ways around copy protection systems. CSS is not a copy
protection system, but thwarts attempts to play the DVD without proper
software. Despite this fact, many Linux distributions do not contain
libdvdcss (for example SUSE Linux, Debian and Ubuntu) for reasons
concerning patents. In most of these cases, the library can be easily
downloaded from the Internet."

This implies that it is only for patent reasons that the software is not
included, and that the library can be safely installed in any country. 

Does anyone know what is going on here? I'd really appreciate knowing
what the precise legal difficulty over this package is, because it will
help for the purposes of wording the documentation. I suppose playing
safe would be relatively easy ("There is some doubt about the legality
of using this library blah blah"), but it'd be nice to get it right.

The answer to this email may be "without a law suit it is impossible to
tell what the position is", but I thought I'd ask just in case someone
knows more than what is set out above.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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