unity-design team mailing list archive

[Shane Fagan <shanepatrickfagan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 23:40 +0200, Conscious User wrote:
> Le mardi 25 mai 2010 à 18:30 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas a écrit :
> > Absolutely, this is something we can and should fix in Maverick. We plan
> > to be selling one or two bits of commercial software in 10.10, and for
> > well-known legal reasons, DVD playback is likely to be one of those.
> 
> But what exactly is the difference between the MP3 legal issues and the
> DVD legal issues? I ask this because currently Ubuntu has two options
> for each, one legal (fluendo/powerdvd) and one which is not legal
> everywhere but given with a disclaimer (gstreamer-ugly/libdvdcss).
> 
> The difference being that for MP3 both options are easy to install,
> while for DVD only the payed version is easy to install and the other
> version requires googling. Making powerdvd available on the Software
> Center would keep this problem. The not-legal-everywhere version would
> still be hard to install.
> 
> Wouldn't this be perceived as a double-standard of respecting the DVD
> patents "more" than the mp3 patents?
The problem with DVDs compared to MP3s is that they require paying for
DVD playback and for MP3s you get 100 free licences so unless you are
going for a huge deployment your not braking any laws. 
So DVD playback is pay per licence but MP3 is 100 free so its fine in
most cases. 

--fagan