It's illegal now to play your DVD on Linux...

From: Sasha Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Wed Feb 09 2000 - 13:58:39 MST


... or to talk about existence of the player:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/02/09/linuxdvd/index.html

In any case, it's an interesting case of criminalization of
source code, and speech about it. So if you tell your friends
that they can play their own DVDs on their own Linux machine,
you all can shortly find yourselves raped in the democratic
U.S. jails (funded at the expense of friends yet uncaught at
other similarly horrible crimes).

It's still legal to talk about nuclear weapons though; the
logic of criminalization of various things in this country
keeps puzzling me, though the number of activities being
criminalized doesn't anymore.

And the limits of tolerance of the supposedly free American
public are definitely not reached yet...

Also interesting fact is that you would be punished for mere
existence of the tools that could allow you to commit crimes.
In Russia, this was called "preventive terror".

If this approach develops further, you may want to remove
all tools from your possession that could allow you to commit
any prohibited violent or sexual acts.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Sasha Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>



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