Re: Legal use of multimdedia software

On Tuesday 09 January 2007 11:03, Jim Gribbin wrote:
> I don't think they do get away with it.
>
> I just got my Fedora workstation at home playing DVDs again. The
> versions of Totem & xine that came with fc6 seemed to have the same
> crippling that the ones that comes with suse has. I had to go get xine
> from Freshrpms to get something un-crippled.
>

Debian's solution is to provide an uncrippled Xine (or Totem, vlc, etc) and
just not provide the decss. At least with Debian I can watch a DVD I made
myself. With SuSE I was protected from violating my own copyright. That's a
service, I guess...

Debian/Ubuntu decss is available simply by adding the Debian multimedia
repository to your apt sources list. Those servers are located outside the
US.

Whether or not there is a legal risk probably depends on the multimedia
software in use. Decss is probably not worth the hassle for MPAA. You'd be
there in court, probably with pro-bono representation, saying "I bought this
DVD from Amazon, and now MPAA is suing me for watching it?" Especially since
actually COPYING a DVD does not require decryption the piracy argument is
really weak for decss, and MPAA and allies wasted a lot of time and money in
Norway losing that battle.

MP3 encoders are patent encumbered, so there is some risk there if your
distribution didn't pay some sort of license fee. Just use ogg. Flash
players are legally available. RealAudio is legally available.

That leaves the win32 codecs. They seem to be very widely available for being
illegal, and Microsoft isn't a company to just let something like that slide.
A lot of the sites I see hosting them are in the EU, which is not exactly
some legal backwater with no copyright or IP laws, and is certainly a region
Microsoft employs lawyers in. However, Ubuntu says there are legal reasons
they don't include the package:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/WindowsCodecs

So it's odd. I don't understand why Microsoft wouldn't step in and start a
court case in Hungary and France (mplayer, debian-multimedia) to stop the
distribution. There's more to the story, I'm sure.

James
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Received on Tue Jan 9 13:30:26 2007