[mythtv-users] DVD Ripping was: Zap2it Labs Shutting Down?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Wed Jun 20 13:47:47 UTC 2007


jason maxwell wrote:
>     But the H'Wood types WANTED you to have to purchase another disk when
>     your first one was destroyed. They saw it as a "revenue stream". So
>     they
>     lobbied for the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act", making it illegal to
>     bypass the CSS system in order to make a backup of a "protected" DVD.
> 
> 
> For this reason, I believe it's still technically illegal to _watch_ a
> "protected" DVD on a Linux machine, because doing so requires decrypting
> CSS with a device that hasnt been licensed to do so. They dont just want
> a "revenue stream", they want to continue making the highest possible
> profit, while continuing to lower the quality, effort, and cost of
> producing this "valuable" content.

Quite correct, AFAIK (I'm certainly not an attorney, and even the folks
who are sometimes can't agree on this stuff).

It's not just that the DMCA is violated by breaking the CSS, it's the
lack of a legal license for the MPEG2 codec (which is NOT "free").
Notice the little MPEG logo on any standalone DVD player.

Generally if you purchase a retail DVD drive it comes with software that
is licensed to play MPEG2, but it is Windows or Mac software. My
personal feeling is that since I paid for the license for that software,
I should be able to play the MPEG DVD legally, but I'm told that many
experts disagree with that position.

I suppose if you ran Windows under emulation in Linux, and then ran the
licensed Windows DVD player under that, you would be legal, but
emulation is not yet quite that good, and the latest Vista license
precludes running under any sort of emulation unless you purchase the
"top shelf" version.

There have been a couple of attempts to license legal MPEG2 players for
Linux, they all seem to have just quietly faded away.

Linux users generally, and Myth users specifically, just don't realize
that they are perceived as "pirates" by many people. Perhaps the fact
that we all know that it is untrue causes us to miss the fact.

Revenue lost to Linux users is nothing compared to the losses due to
commercial-level counterfeiters,or torrent DLs, or Limewore and the like
but, as so often in life, it is the perception of things, not the actual
facts, that drive the industry.

When will they figure out that the harder you make it to watch a DVD the
fewer you are likely to sell ? I suspect that Linux and Myth users have
more than the average available cash, or at least have been shown to be
willing to spend it on video-related things. I think it all really stems
from the fact that H'Wood just does not understand us, and therefore
fears us.

BEWW


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