SuSE 9.1 Personal not good for multimedia?

[Henry Spencer]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Jing Su wrote:
> Basically, CSS is not an open standard.  It's controlled by the CSS
> Consortium.  In order to get access, you must pay a fee (too hefty for
> any open source project to afford) to be part of this consortium to get
> keys for CSS.  However, any project that pays to get access to the keys
> must agree to keep those keys secret, and take extreme measures to protect
> those keys.  This is half the reason why there are no "legally" available
> linux DVD players.

Note that nothing in this restricts reverse engineering to obtain the
information.  The CSS Consortium has no power over people who don't have a
contractual relationship with it.  Trade secrets are not like patents;
independent development of the information isn't a violation.  And once
the secret is out, it's out.

>   The other half is that under the DMCA, it is illegal to break protection
> mechanisms...

Now *this* is a real legal issue... in the US, and only in the US.  Alas,
SuSE probably doesn't want to build separate US and non-US distributions
(at least, not English-language ones).

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml