libdvdcss

[Jerry Haltom]

Refer to the DVD-CCA. http://www.dvdcca.org/ They distribute licenses to
use their PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS and TRADE SECRETS in the US and other
countries. There is nothing public domain about this.

The US at least, and the DMCA specifically, prevents people from
distributing technology that decrypts DVDs. If no other country prevents
people from doing this, at least the US does, and Canonical must operate
in the US. But I doubt that is the case. There some some countries that
have more draconian laws than US.

All that stuff about DVD drives outputting analog copies, that was BS.
There is no such thing. There is only a digital connection from your DVD
drive to your PC. IDE or SATA.

CD-ROM drives used to have an analog cable running to a line input on
the sound card. That has mostly been discontinued... most OSs play the
CD by extracting the digital representation of the music and copying it
to the sound card in software.

On Mon, 2006-05-29 at 01:32 +0100, Tristan Wibberley wrote: 
> 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
> 
>