Re:Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today
by throwawaykf05 on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @07:20AM
(#9967812)
> And in Europe, we don't have valid software patents.
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".
Re:Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today
by egeozcan on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @09:51AM
(#9968593)
I'm interested, could you please give an example?
Re:Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today
by yrro on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @07:14PM
(#9972267)
There are plenty of patents listed at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p..., http://mp3licensing.com/patents/ and http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/hevc/Documents/hevc-att1....
Re:Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today
by Joeri on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @07:02AM
(#9967751)
The underlying motivation of the encryption on DVD's goes beyond preventing piracy. It's about making sure you cannot skip past the ads at the start of the movie. They needed a mechanism to require all DVD players to respect the flags on a DVD that say "this cannot be skipped", and did that by pushing it into the 1996 WIPO treaty that you must have anti-circumvention laws that prohibit people from breaking the encryption on copyrighted materials without the permission of the rights holder. Only licensed players are decrypting with permission. VLC is not a licensed player, so VLC often runs afoul of such laws.
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.
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.