France makes it illegal to watch DVDs in Open Source software!

Published on December 31st, 2006

Posted by SN in General

RFC1149.net – December 30th, 2006:

Starting tomorrow December 31st 2006, reading a DVD protected with CSS (as most DVD are) is illegal in France when it is done with a software allowing to circumvent the protection, such as VLC or mplayer which can both use the libdvdcss library. Today’s Journal Officiel (where laws and executive orders are published) says that you may be fined 135€ (around $180) for doing so. This includes watching any DVD that you have legally purchased.

This nonsense is barely shocking anymore. Think about how everyone, including this blog, fell for the joke that the MPAA was going to start cracking down on home theaters!

But to me the most bizarre (yet true) story was that Sony’s first Blu-Ray drive couldn’t play movies due to piracy. You know the MPAA is paranoid when they force manufacturers to build non-functioning movie players!

15 users responded in " France makes it illegal to watch DVDs in Open Source software! "

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# 1 Bruce IV said, on December 31st, 2006 at 10:43 am

That is why I personally support an interpretation of copyright law that follows more the spirit than the letter – there’ll always be hotshot lawyers that can twist the letter of the law for ridiculous things like this ….

# 2 gquaglia said, on December 31st, 2006 at 11:09 am

I’m waiting for the MPAA approved Blu Ray player with built in credit card reader. Every time you want to watch the disk, you have to swipe your card.

# 3 SN said, on December 31st, 2006 at 11:17 am

#1. Actually, if the MPAA had its way, every single person in the room would have to swipe their card!

# 4 tallwookie said, on December 31st, 2006 at 11:27 am

What I want to know is how this will be enforced

# 5 ECA said, on December 31st, 2006 at 12:20 pm

said it before.
If the BIG corps would drop the Copyrights software, and drop their prices, there would be little or NO hacking. It wouldnt be worth it.
IF the Theaters would drop their prices, there would be NO blackmarket.

# 6 Jägermeister said, on December 31st, 2006 at 12:40 pm

The headline indicates that there are no commercial DVD players for Linux… is this true?

—

Knowing your love for the new and “improved” ID card, you might want to force people to swipe it there as well… that way the authorities can rank you’re Violence Tendency Rating (VTR)™.

# 7 JoaoPT said, on December 31st, 2006 at 1:02 pm

#2 & #3
Actually, that’s what’s good for an RFID chip implanted at birth…or at the annual routine check up…
That way, the player would just charge whoever is in the viewing range.

Don’t you just love the way technology can be used to 1984 your pants off…hipotethically…

# 8 Charbax said, on December 31st, 2006 at 1:28 pm

When the socialists take over the power in France in April, they will actually be changing their laws on digital copyrights, downloading movies in DivX and music in Mp3 will actually become legal when the user pays about 10$ tax on their broadban Internet connection. Thos 10$ per connection will be collected through the ISP, and will be distributed to all the artists, depending on the quality and the popularity of their work. Quality and popularity of works of art can be measured by Web 2.0 apps, for example users can voluntarilly install a plugin for their multimedia playback software which adds a “I like”, “I don’t like” and which monitors the playbacks of MD5 hashed files, as well as monitors the file names and reports all of that to the state-controlled trends monitoring and file-artist associatiative database.

# 9 gquaglia said, on December 31st, 2006 at 1:37 pm

#6 Yup, there is no legal way to play commercial copy protected DVDs on linux if your country prohibits is like here in the US. You can certainly find what you need to do so, but its against the law to do so.

# 10 pedro said, on December 31st, 2006 at 2:30 pm

8 call me when everything craps out

# 11 Al said, on December 31st, 2006 at 2:48 pm

#6 & #9 At least the commercial versions of Mandriva Linux and Linspire come with legal and commercial DVD player software. Mandriva has LinDVD and Linspire has PowerDVD.

# 12 Jägermeister said, on December 31st, 2006 at 3:09 pm

#11 Thanks Al. That means the headline above is screwed up.

# 13 SN said, on December 31st, 2006 at 3:25 pm

#11. Thanks! I had no friggin’ idea that PowerDVD (or anyone for that matter) made DVD playback software for Linux. I’ve fixed the headline, thanks!

# 14 Howard said, on January 2nd, 2007 at 5:16 am

Isn’t it odd that viewing and copying a DVD that you may or may not own may be illegal under certain circumstances, yet I can go into any used book store or used record store and buy copyrighted material with no threat of punishment?

# 15 JoaoPT said, on January 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 am

Or go into Blockbuster and buy ex-rent films. Hmmm, maybe there’s a loophole here…

Memo to myself: enforce second hand copyright.

yours truly
MPAA S. Hark

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