Comment on Unity bans VLC from Unity Store.
ipha@lemm.ee 5 months agoThe “legal grey area” is about codec patents and dvd playback.
Exactly.
Also, I think there was some question about whether it was legal to use ffmpeg under the hood depending on the use case (commercial). I imagine a plugin used inside commercial games would certainly violate licenses based on non-commercial use.
But seeing how my original comment was received, I doubt many here are actually interested in why it may be necessary. Let the anti Unity circle jerk continue.
If you’re using it commercially you should be building it such that it only supports what you need, and what you need should be something not patent encumbered. Because why would you shell out money for an inferior codec when you can choose freely what to encode your stuff with.
“Should” and what’s actual reality in multi national copywrite / license / patent law are rarely the same. Especially in this case where you have to include other people’s work (codecs and media players) just by the nature of the problem.
barsoap@lemm.ee 5 months ago
There’s no software patents in the EU, when it comes to codecs the only thing patentable would be hardware implementations and if you have one of those whoever produces your CPU/GPU already paid for a license. DVD region-locking is at least sus to the commission but they never went ahead with antitrust etc. stuff probably because the market became irrelevant, also, the industry was smart enough to make the whole of the EU a single region. DeCSS is more of a grey area and currently unsettled but a Finnish court judged it legal because the mechanism circumvented is not effective. That’s a legal, not technical, thing, they’re basically saying that it’s closer to “circumventing” a copy blocker by disabling autostart when inserting a CD into your computer than it is to circumventing by actual decryption, which makes sense as the scheme is weak AF. That said if the industry were to upgrade the scheme they nowadays might run into a different set of anti-trust issues. Generally speaking nobody, not even the industry, really seems to care as physical media is pretty much dead.