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Questions of legality WRT dvd software



Hello all,

I'm considering packaging up a small program called dvdbackup, but I'm
ambivalent about it for several reasons.  The program is designed to
extract all the files on a video dvd, and place them in a heirarchy
suitable for use with mkisofs and dvdrecord.  As of yet, it does not
split the image into smaller ones, suitable for burning onto 2 discs
(which is what most people would have to do, unless they want to use
transcode or something to downscale the video, so that it fits onto one
dvd -r).  The author is working on this, and plans to release the split
functions (writing new .IFO's and the like) as libraries.

The reason I'm writing is because I wonder about two things - the
program itself is only a single .c file, about 15K compressed, and I
wonder if there is any point in packaging up something this small and
easy to compile.  Granted, it's not some 4 line shell script, but it
still seems to push the lower bounds of reasonable.

The second thing is the legality of this.  There are, I know, issues
around the DMCA and friends that govern what you are allowed to do with
dvd's, at least in some uncivilized countries, and I don't know if a
program that's sole purpose is to extract stuff off of dvd's will be
redistributable by Debian.  I know that apps like transcode are not in
Debian, although I don't know if this is is the reason.  Anybody
familiar with this terrain feel like commenting?

Thanks,
-- 
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|   ,''`.					     Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :					 sgran@debian.org |
|  `. `'			Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-					    http://www.debian.org |
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