libdvdcss

[Tristan Wibberley]

Usual sort of disclaimer applies: I am not a lawyer and any opinion
expressed is merely wondering aloud in the hope of engaging somebody in
an interesting discussion.

Anders Karlsson wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 18:22 +0100, Tristan Wibberley wrote:
>> Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> [snip]
>>> That's true, to the best f my knowledge, but it remains effectively illegal as 
>>> none of the major players are willing to risk it.
>> Many hardware players decode css encrypted DVDs and output the data in
>> analogue, but high quality, form. I am guessing that they are only legal
>> because at least one content producer has said it's okay for them to do
>> this. I wonder if Canonical released an encrypted DVD could they
>> authorise the use of libdvdcss to decode it and thereby authorise its
>> distribution within Ubuntu?
> 
> The hardware DVD players manufacturers have signed license agreements
> and other related agreements (like not letting decryption keys fall into
> non-licensees hands). They may even have paid for the privilege.

Paid who? and what authority do those people have to avail those
hardware manufacturers of their responsibilities under the DMCA or
equivalent laws in countries other than the USA who's laws I don't know
the names of.

AFAIK, the only license agreements available for CSS knowledge or use
are NDAs covering what was, several years ago, a trade secret. Canonical
and all Ubuntu users and developers already appear to have the
appropriate copyright license for redistribution, derivation and loading
of libdvdcss as its copyright file says it is GPL (although its
copyright statement seems a little unreliable - it says it is copyright
"The VideoLAN Team" and I'm not sure if that is a well defined entity).
AFAIK, it needs no patent license as reports suggest it has no patents
covering it, and I don't think it is any longer a trade secret as the
technology is well understood by a wide variety of people who are not
under NDA.

Does any "new copyright" law specify a particular authority for
authorising the use or distribution of player software for a given piece
of content, or is it the right of the copyright proprietor of the
content in question?

> libdvdcss AFAIK is based on the deCSS effort by DVD-Jon (who
> incidentally has been prosecuted twice over the matter, both times
> unsuccessfully thankfully) which under the DMCA in the USA certainly
> makes it illegal.

According to, admittedly relatively uninformed, discussions and articles
that I've read, but don't have references to them, DeCSS was deemed to
be a circumvention device because the "written to just play on Linux"
argument failed as its test framework for dumping data to examine it (a
necessary part of development) was written for Windows using Win32 APIs.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley