> what made that software product illegal was that the court
No. Some laws are not enforced, but that doesn't make the regulated activity legal.
Someone who owns the original DVD and who wants to play it back (with no storage or format shifting) is breaking the law, because there's no authority from the copyrights holders.
> “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;
Doesn't the authority of the copyright owner to descramble, decrypt, or otherwise bypass a technological measure extend to those who own a legal copy of the copyrighted work? That is, the rightsholder implicitly transfers the authority to decrypt the work when he issues a license to view the decrypted material, even if the medium of transfer stores the work in an encrypted format.
Under this interpretation, the authority would extend to viewing the material on any platform or player, but it wouldn't extend to saving a permanently decrypted copy (as you had a license to view the decrypted material, but not to keep a permanent decrypted copy) as in a rip of the DVD to one's hard drive.
I think that was unintentional. What a I read from DanBC's comment was that it was referring to the fact you stated the court found that it was for breaking the DVD, not for playing it back.. Just because the court said that the problem was something else, and not the playback, does not make the playback legal.
There is no authorised method to do this on Linux. Thus, anyone watching a DVD on Linux is circumventing an effective rights protection measure without authorisation. That's a crime in the US. (And similar actions are crimes in other countries too.)
No, you don't. You just need to decode it. What's illegal is leaving it decoded and redistributing it to others.
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"There is no authorised method to do this on Linux."
One, there doesn't need to be.
Two, of course there is. Have you ever even tried to look?
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"Thus, anyone watching a DVD on Linux is circumventing an effective rights protection"
Luckily, the Supreme Court, the RIAA, the MPAA, and the current Attorney General of the United States disagree with you, as does a casual familiarity with the law.
This is baffling. I really don't understand what you don't get about this.
To watch a DVD you need to decode the CSS.
You either have authorisation to do this, or you don't.
On Linux there is no authorised method to do this, and thus it is illegal.
Whether anyone is interested in prosecuting that illegal use is irrelevant to this discussion; and it's not been what you've claimed.
> What's illegal is leaving it decoded and redistributing it to others.
Let's examine this sentence.
i) circumventing the rights protection without authorisation is illegal.
ii) distributing copy right material without permissions is illegal
Thus, your sentence "What's illegal is leaving it decoded and redistributing it to others" covers 2 illegalities, the circumvention and the distribution.
> Two, of course there is. Have you ever even tried to look?
Yes, I have tried to look. I can't show you what I have not found. Have you tried to look? Feel free to provide a link to any rights holder anywhere giving authorisation.
"This is baffling. I really don't understand what you don't get about this."
The part where the Supreme Court and the US Attorney General say you're wrong is probably your first hint.
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"To watch a DVD you need to decode the CSS."
Yep.
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"You either have authorisation to do this, or you don't."
Authorization is a function of whether you paid for it.
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"On Linux there is no authorised method to do this, and thus it is illegal."
1) There doesn't need to be. Authorization is not about what technology is in use.
2) There are actually Linux DVD players which have paid for their Fraunhofer license; I don't know why you keep claiming otherwise, when a simple Google search can straighten this out.
3) Again, authorization has nothing to do with what software you're using, and everything to do with whether you plonked five dollars on the till at Walmart. It's called the First Sale Doctrine.
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"Whether anyone is interested in prosecuting that illegal use is irrelevant to this discussion"
Why do you keep bringing up something nobody else is talking about, then saying "but that's irrelevant?"
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"i) circumventing the rights protection without authorisation is illegal."
Yes, this is the piece you keep repeating, like just saying it a bunch of extra times will change what authorization is.
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"Thus, your sentence "What's illegal is leaving it decoded and redistributing it to others" covers 2 illegalities"
(sigh)
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"Yes, I have tried to look"
Try harder. There's Fluendo, LinDVD, the codecs in Ubuntu have been licensed from Cyberlink since 2008, Boxee is legal, your TiVo (which is Linux) can give you a legal remote viewer as a .deb, et cetera.
You're too busy feeling correct to check the things being said to you.
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"I really don't understand what you don't get about this."
Which is commonly the case for people who don't consider what it means that they think someone citing the Supreme Court and the US Attorney General is wrong about the law.
> Authorization is a function of whether you paid for it.
No it isn't. Authorisation is a function of whatever rights you're given, normally at the point of purchase but not necessarily.
> 2) There are actually Linux DVD players which have paid for their Fraunhofer license; I don't know why you keep claiming otherwise
I have never said that there are no Linux distributions that do not have a valid Fraunhofer licence. This is not about patent restrictions. We agreed that earlier in the thread, and I thought that you understood that point, but perhaps I was mistaken.
Taking just one example from your list: Boxee uses libdvdcss to circumvent the CSS encryption on DVDs and thus it's possibly breaking the DMCA. Again, just because no-one is going to prosecute doesn't make it lawful.
> someone citing the
None of the cites you've made have supported your various changing positions.
No. Some laws are not enforced, but that doesn't make the regulated activity legal.
Someone who owns the original DVD and who wants to play it back (with no storage or format shifting) is breaking the law, because there's no authority from the copyrights holders.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention)
(http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201)
> “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;