[mythtv-users] re:MythTV production run

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue May 4 21:34:36 EDT 2004


Bill Chmura wrote:

>What is CSS?
>  
>
Content Scrambling System = the reason it's a federal felony offense for 
a MythTV user (or any Linux user) in the US to *watch* a commercial DVD 
on his/her system (regardless of how much he/she paid for the DVD movie).

Most (or, to the best of my knowledge, all) commercial DVD's are 
encrypted using the Content Scrambling System.  To watch the DVD, it 
must be decrypted.  The only way to decrypt the disk is using a) a 
licensed DVD player or b) a "circumvention" technology like DeCSS.  
According to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), the creation, 
distribution, or use of any technology which circumvents an encryption 
mechanism designed to protect copyrighted digital content is illegal.  
The only licensed DVD players which operate on Linux are non-consumer 
products built for OEM's building hardware DVD players which use the 
Linux OS internally (in other words, we can not buy them, so all 
Linux-based DVD players consumers can get for Linux use DeCSS (or one of 
its variants, such as libdvdcss)).  Note, however, that there are 
licensed software DVD players available for Windows and Mac OS (and 
possibly other proprietary OS's).

Mike


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