thelinuxlink.net

http://www.videolan.org/eucd.html
" During the night of 22nd to 23rd December 2005, while everybody is preparing for Christmas, the French Parliament will rule about the "DADVSI" law. This vote will be made with minimal discussion, as an "emergency" has been declared on this law.

This law is the French transcription of the european EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) text, which itself comes from the american DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act).
The main goal of this law is to restrict the rights of digital content purchasers. It most notably forbids them from working around technical content protection measures.
Doing so, writing or publishing software allowing to do so, or even merely talking about ways to do so becomes an offence that can be punished with three years in jail.

VideoLAN is directly impacted, most notably for its DVD reading capability (all Linux DVD reading software has the same problem). Should this law be passed, this would seriously hinder VLC's development. "

Remember in France:
linux & dvd playback = bad
riots, labor strikes & rudeness towrards foreigners in Paris = o.k.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

I'm an ignorant American who cannot read French so visiting eucld.info does me little good in figuring out a way world citizens could do anything to thwart the passing of this law. I'm not seeing anything about it on the eff site.


This all really sucks, though. It's almost as if one should say fuck it and piss on all this patent/copyright bull-shit. There should be no reason for me not to be able to play a DVD on my Linux box.

You hear about businesses wanting to find ways to "tax" the internet or make you pay for content. Well, in some respects we are already paying. If you want to view any wmv or quicktime content you have to pay a tax to Apple or Microsoft to legally view this content. When you think about it that way, I guess MS and Apple are double/triple charging for content they did not produce. CNN pays for the software to encode their video in the wmv format which includes the license to use the codec. They're probably paying MS for the streaming software and they the end user is paying MS for the privilege of being able to use the codec through the purchase of hte Windows OS (or Apple for being able to run Windows Media Player on Apple, which MS probably gets some revenue for). It's a friggin' racket![/list]

dann wrote:There should be no reason for me not to be able to play a DVD on my Linux box.

Especially since they sell DVD player apps for windows for $5. How about letting the linux user buy that license and be in the clear?! That's too simple for the suits to comprehend.

dann wrote:You hear about businesses wanting to find ways to "tax" the internet or make you pay for content.

I tell ya, if it ever came down to that I'd be perfecty happy going back to the BBS days and trading CDs (what used to be 5.25" floppies) with friends to get my software.

I enjoyed the "cloak and dagger" feeling that came with the trading of C=64 game floppies and sharing BBS phone numbers, back in the '80s.

Ahhh... computing used to be so much fun.

I can hear it now... "Pssst. Hey, here's the latest CD of the Arch repository. May the Pacman be with you!"

Judland wrote:I can hear it now... "Pssst. Hey, here's the latest CD of the Arch repository. May the Pacman be with you!"

ROFL, good one Judland, actually back in the 80' Pacman was a pretty darn popular game!

racketeering 21st century style.
Internet was fun until the business got a hold of it.

You hear about businesses wanting to find ways to "tax" the internet or make you pay for content. Well, in some respects we are already paying. If you want to view any wmv or quicktime content you have to pay a tax to Apple or Microsoft to legally view this content. When you think about it that way, I guess MS and Apple are double/triple charging for content they did not produce. CNN pays for the software to encode their video in the wmv format which includes the license to use the codec. They're probably paying MS for the streaming software and they the end user is paying MS for the privilege of being able to use the codec through the purchase of hte Windows OS (or Apple for being able to run Windows Media Player on Apple, which MS probably gets some revenue for). It's a friggin' racket![/list]