FC5 Totem and DVD

Ian Malone ibmalone at gmail.com
Thu Apr 6 15:08:46 UTC 2006


On 06/04/06, Christian Nolte <ch.nolte at fh-wolfenbuettel.de> wrote:
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>
> Styma, Robert E (Robert) schrieb:
> > As Linux makes inroads into the end user market, a simple way to make Linux do
> > what a Windows box will do out of the box would be nice.  This would have to be
> > done by people other than the GPL purists and it would probably be wise to do
> > this outside the United States.
>
> It would be nice to somehow inform the user about those issues when he
> first tries to open media which is potentially illegal to access or
> endangered with patent issues. A really nice suggestion in this
> direction can be found in this article:

>
> IMHO the non GPL-stuff must stay out of fedora because it restricts the
> freedom of a certain user, but it must be in the users power to get the
> problematic media up and running without much hassle.
>

I'm sure someone from RH can give you a better answer, but it's my
understanding that as a US company they open themselves up to
trouble if they even give you instructions on how to do things like
play mp3s. So they quietly mention the unofficial FAQ and let you
work it out for yourself.

Of course this wouldn't be a problem if people didn't believe you
could patent 1+1=2 or that copyright laws really offer any more
protection if they make it an offence to break fundamentally
flawed encryption schemes
(<http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggPCM_Draft3#Encryption_Header>),
but there you go.

--
imalone




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