The Committee for Economic Development on digital copyright

The Committee for Economic Development on digital copyright

Posted Mar 4, 2004 15:55 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435)
In reply to: The Committee for Economic Development on digital copyright by csamuel
Parent article: The Committee for Economic Development on digital copyright

It has been mentioned many times that at the time DeCSS was originally
written, Linux support for DVDs (specifically the UDF filesystem, I believe)
was poor and just not up to the task of creating a Linux version of the
program... So, just to test their theory and see if they were on the right
track to something that could work at all, they tried it on Windoze first...
Once they saw it worked there, they knew they could eventually do the same
thing on Linux, which WAS indeed the original intent... So, yes, I think it
IS fair to say that DeCSS was created as part of an effort to be able to
play DVDs on Linux... True, by itself it's not at all useful for that task;
but, it's merely one (very early) stage in the effort... The fact that it
runs on Windoze is just a necessary evil, given the situation at the time,
and the desire to immediately test their approach...

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