Debian User Forums

Hi, everyone!

I apologize for my english, I'm not a native speaker. Don't hesitate to ask to clarify if you don't understand something in my words.

I read that the last MPEG-2 patents expired in the USA early in February this year :

"This is the list of patents (Attachm​​ent 1) covered by the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License as of October 1, 2018. Under the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License, royalties are payable for products manufactured or sold in countries with an active MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio Patent at the time of manufacture or sale. Please note that the last US patent expired February 13, 2018, and patents remain active in Philippines and Malaysia after that date.​"

Source : http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/ ... tList.aspx

So if I understand this correctly, this might solve the legal problem we have with reading DVDs on GNU/Linux. Could the packages dealing with MPEG-2 located in the Debian Multimedia repositories (e.g. libdvdcss2 ) be moved in the official distribution ? Maybe the fact the patents are still active in Philippines and Malaysia is a problem. I'm not pretty knowledgeable about law and this sort of thing.

There is a discussion on reddit.com about this :

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... ow_patent/

Does anybody here know these things ?

Thanks in advance.

No. Copy protection in the US falls under a different set of laws, not patents.

worov wrote:solve the legal problem we have with reading DVDs on GNU/Linux.

i never had this problem.
there certainly isn't a software problem.
is there a legal problem in your country?

Software that breaks copy protection is still not legal in most jurisdictions. This covers libdvdcss2.
But the jackbooted thugs aren't coming to break down your door if you use it.

dvds are surely still not a thing that makes this relevant?

i mean even on old hardware there can't be still use of dvds?

leaving aside that there was always a way to get one working for many years

edit - and as steve above says, there was never any risk with using the software

Thank you all for your answers.

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:https://packages.debian.org/stretch/libdvd-pkg

I wasn't aware of libdvd-pkg package. I will look into it. Thank you for the information.

When I installed VLC on my Debian jessie system (I use old-stable distribution), commercial DVDs didn't work. It works if I install libdvdcss2 from the Debian Multimedia repository.

debiman wrote:is there a legal problem in your country?

Since libdvdcss2 is not part of the official distribution, I guess there must be a legal problem in some countries.

I live in France. Breaking CSS protected content is indeed illegal in my country. Even if you don't sell copies, or if you don't upload to the Internet, it's still illegal. Yes, I know that cops won't knock at my door to see if I have some DVD copies on my
HDD. But enabling the Debian Multimedia repository installs a bunch of software that I don't need. I prefer to avoid this.

You don't have to enable a repo to install one pkg. There is some help here and a legal page also (videolan is based in France)
https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html

https://wiki.debian.org/CDDVD#Video_DVD

I gave a try to libdvd-pkg and it works. Thank you very much for the recommendation.