video codec patent nonsense

I was making a somewhat more general point, sorry for being unclear.  It is always claimed
that multimedia hackers will get in all sorts of legal troubles due to patent infringement,
reverse engineering and whatnot. Contrary to the FUD, this has never been the case.

The only cases that actually went to court were related to CSS.  However, DVD Jon won fair and
square.  I actually forgot about the case you mentioned, but later there was Bunner and
Pavlovich and this one went well:

http://w2.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/

This is not about "getting away with geek-ware".  VLC is the single most successful free
software application next to Firefox.  I see it on every Windows desktop I encounter.  And it
is so much better than any of its proprietary alternatives that only play DVDs or a small
subset of codecs.

The use cases you describe are valid, but they cover perhaps 1% of the people using multimedia
software.  The vast majority are private people that will never get into trouble for using
libdvdcss to watch their DVDs or for encoding their wedding videos in H.264.