Watching DVDs on Linux is illegal in the USA

Not all Linux users know that launching a licensed DVD on a computer can violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as well as unlocking and rooting phones, removing DRM protection from books and much more.

By the way, it is for this reason that Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have abandoned the built-in DVD-player, and each user must independently find and download the libdvdcss library, but not from the official repository.

Journalist and linux-reader Chris Hoffman (Chris Hoffman) quite easily outlined the essence of the problem . The problem is in the library libdvdcss, which breaks the protection of DVDs with the help of a 40-bit cipher brute-force. This is done in the background transparently to the user.

The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the copyright law in the digital age) takes out of the legal field not only direct copyright infringement by copying, but also the production and distribution of technologies that allow circumventing technical means of copyright protection. Similar laws apply in some other countries, for example, in Germany.
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The contents of most licensed DVDs are encrypted using Content Scramble System (CSS), a form of DRM. The copyright holders formed the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) and receive payments from every DVD player sold in the world that has CSS support installed. Without such support, the player simply cannot play the encrypted contents of the disc. Under the terms of the agreement, the manufacturer of the DVD player is obliged not only to pay royalties, but also to implement in the player support for the regional coding system, so that a DVD purchased in one region of the world will not be played on a player sold in another region.



Unfortunately for media projects, in 1996, when CSS specifications were adopted, there were still restrictions on the export of strong cryptography in America. Therefore, the CSS encryption key had to be limited to 40 bits, and the effective key size is only 16 bits. Because of this, the CSS system was hacked pretty quickly. In 1999, the famous DeCSS program was released, which was written by 15-year-old Norwegian schoolboy Jon Johansen based on decompiling the Xing player code. The program DeCSS was widely used on the Internet, because it made it quite easy to remove the CSS protection from any DVD with brute force. The young hacker was dragged along the courts for several years, but in the end he was found innocent, now he is working as a programmer in the USA.

After the appearance of DeCSS, Linux users for the first time had the opportunity to view licensed DVDs on a personal computer. The Pentium II performs a 16-bit cipher brutforce in about a minute, and a modern PC takes a few seconds, completely sorting out all the options and extracting the correct encryption key.

Now we come to the most important thing - the library libdvdcss, which does exactly that, that is, hacking the protection of CSS. When a user inserts a DVD and starts a video player, the libdvdcss library in the background starts a brute force attack. It ends so quickly that this delay may even be invisible to the user, after which the playback of the contents of the DVD begins.

Although there was no criminal prosecution against developers, distributors and users of the “hacker” libdvdcss library, as in the case of DeCSS, but there is no difference here. Libdvdcss also violates the DMCA law.

The legal way to view licensed DVDs for Linux for an American is to purchase a certified program for viewing DVDs with official CSS support, for example, Fluendo DVD Player .