Re: [MLUG] Anyone planning on getting a OLPC laptop?

[Jack Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 18:05 -0600, Mike Miller wrote:

> Is there any way to play movies on it?  e.g., by ripping a DVD to a USB 
> flash drive?  (There's probably something "illegal" about doing that, but 
> if I have possession of the DVD while using the ripped video file, and I 
> don't store the file for later use or sell the file or transmit it to 
> anyone, how can that be wrong?)

There should be a way to play movies on it. The very worst you'd have to
do is get a statically-compiled version of a Linux movie player like VLC
and run that off the disk. You are very correct in saying that it would
be illegal as every commercial movie DVD I've run across uses the
so-weak-it's-laughable Content Scrambling System DRM. Due to the
oh-so-smart legislators who honestly believe that the Internet is a
series of tubes, we have the DMCA that prevents breaking DRM even for
legal uses (i.e. to be able to simply use the damn product!) 

There are no movie-playing programs that I am aware of on Linux that
have an official CSS decryption key and are legal to distribute in the
U.S. However, CSS is very easy to crack as a very short Perl program
called DeCSS can simply brute-force it a matter or milliseconds. That's
pretty much how everybody on Linux plays DVDs. I've never heard of
anybody getting in trouble over using DeCSS as the servers that host the
DeCSS code as well as programs that have it bundled do not reside in the
U.S. and include the appropriate "WARNING: due to the DMCA, using this
program may be illegal in the U.S." notification. The author of DeCSS,
Jon Johannsen, was sued but got off as he is a Swede and breaking DRM is
not illegal there- only doing something illegal afterwards (hosting the
file to BitTorrent, for example) is. 

--Jack


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