VideoLAN may be affected by new French/European legislation

December 5, 2005

RTV71 used our news submit to tell us "Haven't we seen these tatics before?"

Here we
have a notice posted at the VideoLAN website, that indicates they are about to be negatively
affected by impending legislation quite similar to the American DCMA or Digital
Millenium Copyright Act.

The
freeware VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player
for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg,
...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used
as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a
high-bandwidth network. To learn more about VLC please follow this link!

During
the night of 22nd to 23rd December 2005, while everybody is preparing for
Christmas, the French Parliament will rule about the "DADVSI" law. This
vote will be made with minimal discussion, as an "emergency" has been
declared on this law.

This law is the French transcription of the european EUCD (European
Union Copyright Directive) text, which itself comes from the american DMCA
(Digital Millenium Copyright Act).
The main goal of this law is to
restrict the rights of digital content purchasers. It most notably forbids
them from working around technical content protection measures.
Doing
so, writing or publishing software allowing to do so, or even merely
talking about ways to do so becomes an offence that can be punished with
three years in jail.

VideoLAN is directly impacted, most notably for its DVD reading
capability (all Linux DVD reading software has the same problem). Should
this law be passed, this would seriously hinder VLC's development.

The french website eucd.info collects a
large number of related articles and
documentation