this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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For anyone wondering:
I also thought VLC was a bit shaky on their legality as well, but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc) with more lax copyright laws, they got away with it.
So I wouldn't blame an app store for not wanting to take on legal gray area risk.
VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content
Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?
But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?
For context.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/if-vlc-can-ship-a-free-dvd-player-why-cant-microsoft/
Under French law DVD and Blu-ray codecs aren't patentable and VLC is based in France. The organisation isn't breaking any laws.
Whether using VLC in the US is the legal grey area.
So it's not VideoLAN who might be breaking a law, it's you by circumventing the anti piracy keys in DVDs and Blurays. Millennium copyright act and anywhere that signs up to a treaty containing reciprocal copyright law might have an issue.
Patent infringements might also be possible in the US if you edited that open source code in that country, but US to EU patent treaties don't cover software France deems unpatentable so distributing the codec is probably fine as long as it's of French origin (and non-commercial use as per the GPL licence)
In the UK, the codec might be patentable now after Brexit interestingly but we haven't yet diverged on patent treaties with the EU yet as far as I know and we're part of the US patent treaty still.
Similar things happened with MP3 codecs in Linux before it was also made free. You'd either be prompted to make the choice to install yourself during or after the install. Or perhaps 2 downloads offered, one with and one without.
All to show you as an individual made the choice to use those codecs. If there were any possible damages from an individual download is would be less than $40 in licencing. So a lawyer would have to submit a case for each individual for that as a possible settlement, not even guaranteed.
As long as a large organisation isn't liable for the codec install, it falls into "de minimis" legal territory.
I remember a Live CD install of Ubuntu required some hoops to get codecs at one point in the distant past. I looked it up then out of curiosity.