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DVD playback license

DVD playback license

Posted Feb 17, 2005 9:16 UTC (Thu) by walles (subscriber, #954)
Parent article: OSDL's desktop specificaton

Has there actually been a court decision that you need to pay money to the DVD consortium to watch a DVD?

I don't remember all the twists and turns of the DVD circus, but would it (in some jurisdiction) be illegal for me to licence somebody's LGPL:ed DVD playback software?


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DVD playback license

Posted Feb 18, 2005 14:46 UTC (Fri) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

IANAL - but I believe that in order to play back DVD's, you have to license the CSS code from the DVD Consortium and get a Key. This is protected by copyright and the DMCA. Obviously DeCSS is available, but it's also quite clearly illegal under the DMCA as a copyright-circumvention device (lots of cases - specifically see <http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/>> )

So, I believe the answer is that is that yes, you need to pay money to the DVD consortium to legally a DVD.

DVD playback license

Posted Feb 24, 2005 15:24 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Granted that you live in the US or another country which has a law similar to the DMCA, yes. Not all countries do.

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