Re: [Banshee-List] videos

[gnomeuser gmail com]

The best legal advice available to the wider Open Source community is to not distribute libdvdcss as that is likely to be considered unlawful circumventing a copyright protection mechanism under the DMCA. Behaviour for which the industry has exercised their option to sue in the past.

Additionally the MPEG2 codec used on DVDs is covered by software patents we have no license to distribute. The same is the case for a lot of media formats such as mp3, AAC, etc. Luckily for playback of popular formats there are options like Fluendo’s codec packs you can buy and have legal support (they offer a free of cost but not open source mp3 playback plugin for GStreamer as I recall but it has been a while since I used Linux last).

Projects like FFMPEG and VLC get around this largely by distributing their software from outside the US and having development done outside the US. This isn’t a bulletproof approach but that is largely one suspects because there is little money (trust me, we have none) in suing popular Open Source projects and a lot of bad PR (not a good legal shield). 

Basically, if we add this functionality, lawyers have the option of rising from their graves and haunt us. It’s better allround if we avoid this. Yes it’s silly.. but this is the world you and I both live in.

—
Sent from Mailbox

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 11:53 PM, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair ubuntu com> wrote:

<signature.asc>