1.) AC3 patent royalty needs to be paid to Dolby as all your DVDs are encoded in AC3 (with some titles in LPCM)
2.) MPEG LA requires patent royalty as well for any MPEG2 playback, again, commercial DVD’s video streams are MPEG2

Optional license based on what OEM’s choose:
1.) DTS audio license
2.) Dolby 6ch, Dolby Prologic, etc etc.

The list can go on.

How can Dell do it legally, if Ubuntu itself cannot do it legally — within the US?

Mark Shuttleworth says: Dell installs a non-free application, from a vendor who has paid patent licenses for some of the technology required to decrypt DVD’s. It is not legal in the USA to bypass that system using free software. This is as silly as the old regulations that prevented companies in the US from putting strong cryptography in their products, but it’s the law there nonetheless.

This is one of the few areas where I was perplexed when I first tried Ubuntu (6.06 Dapper Drake). I have since enjoyed Xine and all of the restricted codecs that can be easily installed with automatic installers of restricted or proprietary codecs such as the Automatix installer. My first struggles with Ubuntu was getting it to play *all* of my DVDs and MP3 files.

Thank you for starting Canonical, releasing the Ubuntu project, and working with Dell to release it pre-installed on their PCs. Without you, fighting Microsoft would be a much more difficult challenge, especially when I evangelize to Windows users who couldn’t punch their way out of a technological paper bag.

Including … or not … some DVD playing software really isn’t an engineering problem; it’s a commercial legal problem. Someone is bound to object; maybe a judge will agree with the objection; and it’s really not worth Mark Shuttleworth’s time and money to get tangled up in it. It might, for example, happen over the proposition that someone is going to import a Ubuntu into the USA.

It’s a mess, and it’s holding ‘the industry’ back. How do you learn to be an engineer, if every time you want to try something fairly basic (like make a DVD player or an ‘MP3′ player) you get the Economic Crimes police on your back ?

The dvd situation has nothing to do with software patents, and I wish this issue was sorted out by the Freedom Law Centre when I brought it up last month. It’s very annoying to be told to go away because the problem just isn’t important or interesting enough for the people who are supposed to be clarifying free software legal positions.

The problem is the DMCA in the USA and the EUCD in the EU; Both prohibit the use of decryption software which breaks the encryption schemes used in commercial DVD video discs. Ubuntu can and will right out of the box play DVDs, just not encrypted ones. The library that most of us use to play our legally owned DVDs is called libdvdcss and is completely Free Software.

Now we have three options as I see it:

1) We get some clarification from some kind Lawyer who will look at the problem and come back and say that there isn’t a problem after all since the DMCA has clauses for compatibility.
2) We take libdvdcss to the DVD forum and get it approved with it’s own keys, this is the least likely to happen since the DVD forum may require per seat licenses, this wouldn’t be possible at the moment unless the key which decrypts the data was held separately and added on afterwards. This would be a neat way of getting around the problem by working with the DVD forum who control the formats.
3) We push the pay-for model by making the commercial products which are licensed for use available to all ubuntu users in an easy and safe to use manner. This has to disadvantage of killing the software’s ability to be Free Software and allows all sorts of security problems.

More attention needs to be paid to this problem if it is to go away; we might not be able to throw win-codecs32 out until ffmpeg has finished their reverse engineering of the windows media format, but at least we’d be able to support normal DVD decryption. All we then have to worry about is Blu-Ray and HD-DVD video discs which have an even more hideous encryption method.