Imagine a world where you buy a DVD from a store. All shiny cellophane wrapped, with the holographic tape sealing the plastic clamshell case closed...then take it home to enjoy. You unwrap it and put it into your computers DVD player to enjoy a show while you wait for an online appointment’s time to arrive. Oh! Wait! You get an error message. It seems this DVD wont play in your computer. This is because this DVD is encrypted. You just bought the DVD, and in the US that means you have the right to view the contents of the video encoded into the DVD platter. But your computer is running open-source software, and with very few notable exceptions only has patent free code in the machine. If I wanted to put this disk into the DVD player in the living room, I could watch this. That players manufacturer has paid the people who own the rights to the knowledge of the encrypting method for the right to decrypt DVD movies. Turns out there is a library that can easily be installed into this open source computer, but it is kept off-shore from the US. So offensive is it that people might actually be able to watch their movies as they see fit, that it is illegal to possess code to decrypt DVDs...even though it is the owners right to view the content. The motion picture lobby group took several people to court over this very thing...they won a case where the people were simply pirating DVDs to sell. But they lost a case where a mother was simply trying to watch a movie with her son. So this is where it stands. It is illegal for you to decrypt the DVD, but your right to view the content on the DVD outweighs this fact. What an amazing pile of bullsh*t this is. If you own an Ubuntu computer and want to watch encrypted videos, you can use the following two terminal commands to get what you need. sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh Then reboot, and you should be golden. This should take longer for you to type these two commands than to load the incredibly small amount of code needed to do this simple task.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 10:01:05 +0000
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