DVD playback

Graham oldrocker at f2s.com
Tue Jun 28 13:38:43 UTC 2005


On Tuesday 28 Jun 2005 13:53, Ben Novack wrote:

> Have you added either the hoary-extras or marillat repositories? The
> default Ubuntu repos don't have libdvdcss2, for legal reasons.

I wonder what those legal reasons are, and under what jurisdiction they 
relate?

Here in the UK, the legal position (I am told) is that if you hold a 
legally obtained original DVD it is perfectly alright to use software 
to play that DVD if the encryption on that disk prevents playing 
otherwise.  This is the equivalent of resetting the regions which your 
stand alone DVD player uses to play DVDs and is likewise perfectly 
legal.  It is also legal to reverse engineer software, and this is how 
dvdcss came about, and it is accepted that dvdcss is a legally produced 
piece of software.

It is NOT legal to copy DVDs for anything but personal use, but dvdcss 
won't do this, nor do you have to install it to allow other software to 
copy a DVD.  A DVD-RW drive will do this effectively for you and these 
are not illegal.

Now, I can understand the Ubuntu repositories being afraid of the DVD 
producers coming after them to try to impose their view that DVDs 
should only be played in ways they want, because they have enormous 
financial resources and may want to try and make courts in all parts of 
the world uphold that view.  But this is not the same as saying that 
dvdcss should be excluded from the repositories for legal reasons.

The Ubuntu repositories are quite within their rights to say that they 
do not wish to include dvdcss in their repositories, as most do, but I 
do not know of any other repositories to exclude it because it is 
illegal to include it.  So could you clarify these "legal reasons"?

-- 

Graham

-- 

Graham




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