DVD Players & these DeCSS Rulings

[Wes Shull]

steve_dum at mentorg.com wrote:

> it would be legal to distribute a program that allowed individuals
> to record their own personal DVD's using DeCSS encription (to assure
> maximal compatibility with DVD players)

I'm not even going to speculate on the legality issue, but where did you 
get the idea that using CSS makes a disc more compatible?  CSS is a purely 
optional part of DVD encoding; a not inconsiderable number of commercial 
DVDs are released without CSS scrambling, probably because it's 
cheaper--no paying CSS fees through your mastering/replication facility.  
It'll be interesting to see if these fees go away now...

--wes (sorry for the OT digression)