[Narann]

> The libdvdcss thing is probably just the French being awkward in that way they love to do; if it had been the UK they would have rolled over without a word of complaint.

As much as we have fun co-bulling with UK, this statement does not make sense.

Allowing libdvdcss is consistent with a long story about the medium/support/distribution not being legally sanctified against the content. Beyond the chiming about entertaining content (MP3/MP4 VS CD/DVD), the point is to never let anyone/anything (individuals, professionals, and most important public services), being locked to a particular support if their think its not in there interest. Before the DRM mess, this has been a source of problem when some software editors fall down and we had billions of documents in a closed format and some research project to convert those files back to something readable (which is kind of non-sense). If support and distribution sucks, you should not being locked to it and can choose to invest time and money to change it. The simple fact you are ready to invest in unlocking yourself is almost considered good enough. The “Cour de cassation” (most important juridical instance) always decides in favor of content owner than content distributor. I suspect the globalization makes those statement even more important as you don’t want your public service to be locked down to software solution of another country.

I don’t think it’s that much award. Many countries are doing the same and some considers copyright as an American soft power, especially for softwares. Content openness is such a thing it has modified the way even big software companies are making money.

Hope this helps.

[marcus_holmes]

Thanks for the clarification. I agree completely and I'm glad someone is fighting the good fight ;) My original statement was mostly tongue-in-cheek - my bad for not marking it as such