[vlc-devel] Subtitles downloader for VLC

[Felix Paul Kühne]

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Hello again.

On 08.05.2008, at 00:04, Jean-Philippe ANDRÉ wrote:
> I suppose providing copyrighted subtitles is illegal, but there are  
> not
> only copyrighted materials.
It is illegal because it is a derived work from a copyrighted item  
without prior written permission. In the same spirit, you may not  
translate a book to a foreign language without asking its original  
publisher first.

> Could not we have such a disclaimer displaying each time the user  
> wants to use this module ?
This would be make sense, but I still have bad feeling about this as  
the Subtitles-Downloader is clearly intended for mainstream,  
commercial movies. Virtually no home-movies use subtitles (or even a  
subtitles-download page to distribute them).

> Same for youtube, etc... scripts.
That's a different point. The lua-scripts providing access to YouTube,  
etc. are just different ways of accessing the same streams as it was  
possible using your webbrowser. In fact, VLC is just a web-browser  
which doesn't show the html, but the FlashVideos only. YouTube is no  
legally controversial platform (although some of its contents are  
voiding 3rd party's copyrights, but that's another matter and none of  
our business) in contrast to Subtitles-download pages.

> The user must be responsible of his own acts. If he downloads  
> something non free, then he is responsible of this.
We need to make this fact very clear in any case. However, I hope to  
meet a friend of mine next week, who is quite familiar with this kind  
of problems (having a law-background himself).
Anyway, as already pointed yesterday, some time ago we refused to  
include a demuxer for ed2k-files for legal reasons. I'd like to see  
reasons in which ways this case is different to our previous decision.

> The module should not (and does not) download anything in a fully
> automated way. The user always has to accept and demand the download.
That's definitely a good thing, but I don't know (yet) whether this is  
enough.



On 08.05.2008, at 11:54, Pavlov Konstantin wrote:
> I think that possibility to transcode rented media (e.g. DVD) should  
> be
> removed as well, as it endorses the theft as well.

No, you are mixing things up here IMO. It's clearly legal within the  
European Union to create private copies of your own, bought media for  
backup and compatibility reasons as long as they are not protected by  
a reliable copy protection mechanism (which is why my personal opinion  
is that it is legal to rip CSS-protected DVDs as CSS is obviously no  
strong, reliable copy protection mechanism, but this opinion still  
needs to be confirmed in court).
If you abuse your personal right to create private copies of disks you  
own (read: not "you possess") for your personal usage by illegally  
copying media which is only possessed for a limited time, then it's  
your personal problem. VLC's streaming and copying mechanisms are  
clearly intended for different purposes. Additionally, VLC is not and  
will (hopefully) never be advertised as a DVD-ripping application.


Best regards,
Felix


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