Well, there are 2 legal parts that apply here: - DRM - software patents.
Software patents for DVDs are almost all over (it's a 20 year old technology). And in Europe, we don't have valid software patents.
On the DRM part, libdvdcss is not DeCSS, it's either finding the right key or brute-forcing to find the right key. In order to play a DVD, you need to "open" the DRM, else you cannot have playback.
In the case of VLC+libdvdcss-bundle, it's usually fine in (sane) juridictions because it's a player, not violating the copyrights holders. On some other, it's illegal.
That is categorically untrue, and you should stop telling people that. In Europe, software is not patent-eligible "as such", but it is if it solves a technical problem.
The only thing that eliminates is "business method" patents, which are just a subset of what people generally refer to as "software patents".
Just because the patents expire doesn't make the anti-circumvention laws go away. Those laws only stop applying once the copyright on the DVD expires, in a century or so.
"libdvdcss
libdvdcss is a library that can find and guess keys from a DVD in order to decrypt it. This method is authorized by a French law decision CE 10e et 9e soussect., 16 juillet 2008, n° 301843 on interoperability.
NB: In the USA, you should check out the US Copyright Office decision that allows circumvention in some cases."
How do you not circumvent the copy protection to read a DVD?
(See my various talks about libdvdcss)
The case here seems more related to the MPEG patents though.
I think there was also the Sony jailbreaking guy who settled with Sony out of court.
The law made "organized discussion" about breaking copy protection illegal so they also created a website with the title "organized discussion" and displayed code for breaking the protection and someone also paid 5 cents for it after which they turned themselves in :)
Apparently the lower courts acquitted them but that was reversed and the supreme court didn't take the case. So the end result is that it's illegal but they didn't receive any penalties. Apparently the European court of human rights didn't accept the case either.
http://mjr.iki.fi/eucd/ (discussed here in Finnish)
http://www.digitoday.fi/yhteiskunta/2008/05/26/dvdn-katselu-... (news article about it)
> Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable (see French section below). Therefore, software patents licenses do not apply on VideoLAN software.
From http://www.videolan.org/legal.html