VLC not allowed to support Blu-ray disc playback in France

[djohnston]

Source

Recently, VideoLAN, the team behind the opensource video player VLC, has been informed by HADOPI - The anti-piracy organization in France- that VLC is not allowed to support Blu-ray disc playback in France unless they got the permission from Sony.

Since version 2.0, experimental Blu-ray support has been a feature of VLC. However, playback of disc protected by AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is not supported. VLC also does not support of BD+ discs because Sony, the developer of the Blu-ray copy protection, only provide encryption keys to licensees.

According to the French law for intellectual property, companies are allowed to ask government organisations, in this case HADOPI, for permission if important information that is essential for interoperability is withheld from them. And the French anti-piracy organisation decided that VideoLAN will have to ask Sony for the permission and they are not allowed to get information from decompiling or reverse engineering of the code. And because Sony only gives encryption keys to licensees, VideoLAN wont be able to get a license from Sony for Blu-ray playback, as they would need to opensource up the code.

From L'Informaticien.

[mimas]

> And the French anti-piracy organisation decided that VideoLAN will have to ask Sony for the permission and they are not allowed to get information from decompiling or reverse engineering of the code.

HADOPI is more than an anti-piracy organisation, it's a governmental commission with the « most valuable » experts on IT. Its anti-piracy parts is "educational", it was initiated to get rid in emergency of the I-didn't-know-it-was-piracy habits of the french internauts. The real part of HADOPI is to create a framework for french IT and its laws.

It costs us more than hundred millions euros a year and is only capable of answering "get lost, read the law!" to developers who wanted to get advices from this commission and its experts. Moreover, It only take one year to have a partial answer; the technical part (how to unlock DRM without breaking the law) was lost in process.

[Taco.22]

Hey, love the term "internauts".  Jules Verne would have been proud!

[melodie]

Hey, love the term "internauts".  Jules Verne would have been proud!

Good get... ^^

[djohnston]

It costs us more than hundred millions euros a year and is only capable of answering "get lost, read the law!" to developers who wanted to get advices from this commission and its experts. Moreover, It only take one year to have a partial answer; the technical part (how to unlock DRM without breaking the law) was lost in process.

Sounds like they took their cues from the U.S. gubmint.