ZFS & Libdvdcss Should Soon Be In Debian

[cjcox]

Have you even read that article? That is exactly what he did, that is why he said that they now received the legal advice from the SFLC and that they gave the advice that it is OK to incororate those packages.

Personally, since it is illegal... I'd love to know how they made it "legal". Wouldn't we all like to know this? (talking libdvdcss, not ZFS)

[Xaero_Vincent]

Personally, since it is illegal... I'd love to know how they made it "legal". Wouldn't we all like to know this? (talking libdvdcss, not ZFS)

I'm wondering this myself.

The only thing that comes to mind is that the Software Freedom Law Center may be willing to indemnify Debian in the highly unlikely event of a lawsuit? There is techincally a legal route to DVD Playback on Linux; It's the $18 OnePlay DVD Player from Fluendo. The problem is few people care about DVD content enough anymore to want to buy legal software for playback and today, it's all about streaming HD content or BluRay.

[RahulSundaram]

I'm wondering this myself.

The only thing that comes to mind is that the Software Freedom Law Center may be willing to indemnify Debian in the highly unlikely event of a lawsuit? There is techincally a legal route to DVD Playback on Linux; It's the $18 OnePlay DVD Player from Fluendo. The problem is few people care about DVD content enough anymore to want to buy legal software for playback and today, it's all about streaming HD content or BluRay.

Debian is backed by a non-profit. If they get sued, the most that can be asked for is to stop distribution from that point onwards. There is likely no monetary liability since there is no profit motivation that can be claimed. This makes it much more palatable to do certain things that other distributions won't/can't do including shipping mp3 codecs.

[Luke_Wolf]

Uh... everyone. Who has petabyes of drive space at home to house all their HD content? I suppose you could compress it to death... then you'd have HD that rivals 480p in quality.

Also, ripping HD content from Blu-ray is still problematic.

Who watches TV or movies on a screen larger than a tablet? Yes, I'm poking at your age now. Just because you find it comfortable to have huge TV and movie rips for large screen viewing at incredible HD resolutions doesn't mean that today's teen, who doesn't know what a big screen is.... will do the same. And my guess is that today's teen doesn't mind lower resolution data coming to their phone vs. forcing some hideous transcoding on some backend end server. Why not deliver something more reasonably targeted to the end device? Smaller, less bandwidth, etc.. often much more important than super-ultra-mega-crunchy HD. The latter may not make much sense at all.

What is old is new again. Low def FTW!

Not saying that your love of "new" and "bigger" isn't ok... just saying it's not the only way to view things.

There are these things called Netflix and Hulu. DVDs are still a thing, yes, but they're becoming less of a thing over time and Netflix killed the video rental stores.

[Akka]

Debian is backed by a non-profit. If they get sued, the most that can be asked for is to stop distribution from that point onwards. There is likely no monetary liability since there is no profit motivation that can be claimed. This makes it much more palatable to do certain things that other distributions won't/can't do including shipping mp3 codecs.

But it is still possible to sue debians user? Some of them is not non-profit.

[Adarion]

dvdcss?

Who watches SD content nowadays? From a DVD drive?

I do. A good bunch of my computers even have floppy drives.
Actually, what else would you try in Linux?
BluRay is problematic. AACS and stuff. Then you need good video acceleration for the content. The same goes for any streams that are encapsulated in flash or silverlight. First get the content, then get it accelerated at all.
From that point of view DVDs are quite comfortable.
Also the argument that was brought already about file sizes: Running stuff from HDD / SSD may be comfortable, yes, but this takes up a considerable amount of space.

[Luke]

I've never HEARD of a user lawsuit for libdvdcs

But it is still possible to sue debians user? Some of them is not non-profit.

I've never even HEARD of such a lawsuit. An institutional or corporate user worried about an ex-employee going to Hollywood to complain need not install the package, I douibt it will be installed by default. LinuxMint offers a "no codecs" version for institutional users for exactly that reason.

I've never heard of a sucessful end user lawsuit over Linux software. The only way our enemies would ever know is a snitch against an institutional user, those angered by an abusive employer can be quite creative. For an individual user this is wholly out of the question. DVD's are not known to do things like phone home, so Hollywood would literally need to be able to search everyone's filesystem just to find out who is using an "illegal" codec or DRM bypass. Any attempt at that would probably backfire the way the Sony "XCP" Windows rootkit on DC's did. Sony execs were lucky to avoid jail time for that one.

With proprietary software, on the other hand, users are vulnerable to patent trolls who sue monetized distributers, subpeona customer lists (Debian doesn't have one!), and send out bluffing demand letters, notably the ones demanding licensing fees for printing out emails. I have not heard of any sucessful lawsuits for refusal to pay these demand letters, same as telling Getty to stick their demand note where the sun doesn't shine and finding out their lawsuit threat is nothing but hot air.

[not.sure]

Personally, since it is illegal... I'd love to know how they made it "legal". Wouldn't we all like to know this? (talking libdvdcss, not ZFS)

You probably need to ask a lawyer whether it's (still) illegal or not, which is apparently what they did. There only need to be similar cases having been tossed out by courts to make it legal, and only lawyers are really on top of such things.

[blackiwid]

Have you even read that article? That is exactly what he did, that is why he said that they now received the legal advice from the SFLC and that they gave the advice that it is OK to incororate those packages.

hmm ok sorry I did read it but seems in the hurry I confused it a bit. you are right.

[Chewi]

dvdcss?

Who watches SD content nowadays? From a DVD drive?

I do too. I have a decent enough connection but I don't like pointlessly wasting bandwidth on stuff like that. I get movie rentals on disc through the post. I can't pick what I want and watch it immediately. So what? I'm not that impatient. I do get Blu-rays too but not everything I want to watch is on Blu-ray.