Legal Status of libdvdcss

[Randy Gloden]

Matthew, check out

    http://cryptome.org/dvd-hoy-reply.htm

This document gives a lot of the backgound to the legal issues. 

The "DVD Copy Control Association" is the current licensing entity for 
CSS.  To get their angle, check out:
    http://www.dvdcca.org/faq.html
 In a nutshell, their claim, the main elements of their security were 
stolen and posted on the internet.  DeCSS uses those stolen elements. 

Another quote state:  "The creation of 'DeCSS' is a violation of 
California's 'trade secret' laws because it is based on the code in CSS, 
which is legally protected."

Another good site for information is 
http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/cca.html which details serveral DVD CCA 
lawsuits.

I think if a lawsuit were to occur, it would follow the pattern of DVD 
CCA initiating the case with possibly MPAA joining in.

 
Now for the big question, is it possible to have a "free" legal Linux 
DVD player (in US and wherever else these laws are screwed up).

1.  Free as in speech, Never.  In the CSS Licensing agreement at 
http://www.dvdcca.org/data/css/CSS_license_ver_1_2.pdf, page 3, section 
1.22, it starts to detail the modes of protection required by the 
license.  There are procedure specifications located in another document 
that works in conjunction with this.  My conclusion, based on this and 
other parts of the document that detail this, is that in order to be 
legal, the decryption module would have to be securely tied to the 
player, in such a way that the data was protected end to end.  In other 
words, you would not be able to distribute the player and decryption 
module seperately unless you could devise a system whereas the module 
couldn't be used seperate from the player by other unauthorized 
applications.  Thus, I think you would have to distribute the CSS code 
and player in binary format only, and in such a way the CSS mechanism 
would be protected from usage from unauthorized applications.  No free 
as in speech in that arrangement.

2.  Free as in beer, perhaps.  It appears there are some processing fees 
and such, but the organization claims to be a non-for-profit 
organization that offers a world wide royalty free license.  A quote the 
CSS License Agreement:
            "2.1. Nonexclusive License. Subject to the terms and 
conditions of this Agreement, Licensor
grants to Licensee a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, 
nontransferable right, under the
Licensed Rights:"


What we really need if for a lawyer to look over this document because 
IANAL and the document is deep in legalese.  In other words, that is my 
take, but I could definately be wrong on multiple accounts. 

No one in our community is going to go to the effort to create a free 
close-source player/CSS implementation.  Even in the commercial realm 
several companies that already have Linux DVD players have published 
their software for Linux embedded devices only.   There doesn't seem to 
be anyone screaming for this.

The most frustrating thing about the whole affair of things is this: 
    1.  A person that is prone to copy CSS protected DVDs will not have 
any moral hangups about installing libdvdcss2
    2.  The person who will not install libdvdcss2 on moral/legal 
grounds would probably not copy CSS protected DVDs in the first place.
    3.  A copy protection system that has been compromised in no longer 
securing anything, thus serving no real purpose but to frustrate us (or 
at least some of us).

--------randy
www.microbabble.com






Matthew East wrote:

>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
>  
>
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