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Grant Sewell wrote: | On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:00:08 +0100 Neil Williams | <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: | | Actually, I feel that non-real-time discussions of political | topics is a great thing!
Me too, although I hope it doesn't put off those who currently are here because MS Windows ate their Word document once too often.
| Unfortunately, to be technically legal the Free Software written | to play DVDs also needs a licence to use the CSS | encryption/decryption, and unfortunately this licence is not a | one-off payment variety. Who would pay the on-going licence fees | to allow the Free Software DVD player to remain legal? Now, I do | not agree with the idea of said licence fees, but my opinion | doesn't change the reality of the _current_ situation!
I think this is an important point, and my understanding is that free software DVD players are perfectly legal in the UK, despite the best efforts of the media moguls to make them illegal, and to act as though they were illegal.
The law states that the distribution of devices to defeat an "effective" encryption scheme is only illegal if the predominant purpose of such devices is to make illicit copies. It isn't clear to me that free software DVD players meet this criteria, or that prior European law on interoperability and reverse engineering doesn't take precedence even if it were seen as being in breach of this particular statute.
I finally caved into the modern trend and bought a DVD player, and my latest CD drive is also a DVD player, and I will continue to watch my DVDs (CSS or otherwise) on my free software only Debian box unless and until the law become clearer on this point.
Whilst I sympathise with the views of those advocating free software, and I don't really see much need for proprietary software these days (pretty much everything I try an do with Free Software I discover there is already a free software package in Debian for, but maybe I lack imagination or some such*), repetition doesn't make a message any more true or forceful. Please try and be original or just point people at the original text.
*Recent things missing from my free software arsenal. 1) Blunder checking for chess games (I wrote one quite quickly - Perl has some very handy libraries - although some people say a command line tool in Perl is too esoteric for others to use - what say yea? - Guess I could always give it a web interface ;)
2) Room planners (Hmm still not happy with this one, although I have a lot of diagramming and other tools)
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