(2014-06-10, 12:49)aeropriest Wrote: - Any idea how do these guys support blu-ray http://www.vidon.me/products.htm we might follow same steps. Glad you brought it our attention
I really hope that you are, because I am supportive of your project, and I am hoping that I will save you from a
lot of terrible grief. You may not have been aware of it, but you are treading on
very dangerous gound, legally speaking.
As Starstream said, there are corporate interests here in the United States who will most definietly
hunt you down and will do everything possible to ruin your business unless you are very very careful about the exact way you try to enable people to play
either copy protected DVDs or copy protected Blu-Ray disks (or even non-copy-protected Blu-Rays, I guess). And you would be making a big mistake, I think, to assume that you will be somehow magically immune to the concerted efforts these corporate interests just because
you are physically located in China. That is not the important question. The important question is:
Where are your customers? If a lot of them are in the United States, then you will be shipping products to the United States. You might possibly be bankrupted if you shipped, say, 1,000 units in a batch to a distributor in the United State and if (because of legal proceedings against you here) those were all seized by Customs and held indefinitely, or at least until you appeared in a U.S. courtroom to defend yourself (where you would surely lose anyway). And that's not all. Depending on a number of different factors, your legal adversaries might even/also be able to seize your company's domain name, thus making your main web site suddenly go dark. How will you make any sales then?
Let me make two suggestions:
1) Go to Google and do a search for "linking to deCSS" and then start reading... a lot. In particular, the info at this link is likely to be very enlightening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_C..._Reimerdes
There are two important points to be understood from the above Wikipedia article, and from all of the other things that you can find online about this topic, i.e. (a) in the end the movie studios won, and also (b) they were so furious about the fact that people were able to play copyrighted movies without their permission (on hardware that they had not approved or received any royalty payments for) that they (the movie studios) even started legally hassling
even those people and web sites that only linked to copies of deCSS that were actually stored elsewhere on the Internet. Oh! Yes! And also you should understand that these organizations have almost
unlimited money to spend on lawsuits and other ways to try to ruin your business, if you get on the wrong side of them. (And do not make the mistake of thinking that the reach of U.S. laws would never extend to Hong Kong. Is Edward Snowden still there?
No!)
2) I am most definitely
not a lawyer, and thus cannot give you any legal advice which is worth anything more than what you paid for it (i.e. nothing),
however let me say that it is my belief that you might possibly be legally OK if you were to ship out units (or add-ons) that contain optical media drives
and also place into the package with each one of those a piece of physical paper on which would be written clear and simple instructions to the end user about he/she could download, from the Internet, whatever additional libraries might be needed to playback either DVDs or Blu-Rays or both. That makes work for the end user, but not very much, and it would likely keep you out of legal trouble.
You see, we have this thing here in the U.S. called
The First Amendment which protects our rights to freedom of speech, and freedom of writing. Something that is written on a physical piece of paper is likely to receive the maximum legal protection of the First Amendment (for historical and other reasons). As noted on the Wikipedia page I have referenced above, the (legal) problem with the hyperlinking (on the web) to sites that were distributing the deCSS code was found by the judge in the case to be "
the functional equivalent of transferring DeCSS code to the user themselves." Many people in this country and elsewhere disagree (in some cases massively) with that particular legal conclusion, but that is what the judge said, and that legal precedent still stands. Hoever it would be
vastly harder and arguably impossible for any legal Plaintiff here in these United States to say that by distributing a mere piece of paper (with some black marks on it) that what you are doing is "
the functional equivalent" of actually transferring the (illegal) code to the end user.
But in order to be safe, before you go out and base (or risk) your whole business (and your whole life too perhaps) on any plan to sell boxes that can play DVDs or Blu-Rays, you really should consult with an actual attorney... hopefully one who actually has some background in this specific area of law.
Of course, if you don't have the money for that... and I am guessing that you don't... then you might consider my simple suggestion above. Neither I nor anyone else can guarrantee that doing that will keep you 100% safe from legal troubles, but I do believe that it will make it rather substantially less likely that you will be sued, i.e. for alleged violations of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Just one more thing... If you
do in fact go with that plan (ie. distributing download instructions on paper, packed in with every optical drive you ship) then you would be well advised to try to put as many
different possible downloading URLs on that piece of paper as possible. You don't want to have to snail-mail out to your customers new pieces of paper if the movie studios manage to get the first web site you reference taken down, or even the first five on your list.
Oh! And about VidOn.Me.... I really don't know how they are getting away with playing optical media, but I did just peruse their web site (and also the WHOIS records for their domain) and I found
absolutely nothing that would in any way give away their actual physical location. I have studied the behavior of spammers (and studied how to track them down) for more than 15 years and this is what a lot of them do also. They hide. They hide in order to avoid getting sued. (If you cannot serve them, physically, at a physical location, with legal papers, then in most cases you can't sue them.)
So you have to ask yourself:
Is this the way you want to run your business and your product and your life? Always in hiding? If you will be content to have a small and inconsequential business and product, then maybe the anser is "yes". Otherwise, you will have to find some other solution or else give up on the (stackable) optical drive module entirely.