French Parliament Kills Linux?

Update December 24: The French Parliament has tabled the proposed law for now and will debate it in January.  Hopefully sanity will prevail.

On December 23, the French Parliament will vote on the DADVSI Law, which stems from the European Union Copyright Directive and the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act.  These laws make it illegal to circumvent digital media copyright protection measures in the United States and several other countries.  If the DADVSI law passes, VideoLAN and the debian-marillat repository will be directly impacted, and several packages for playing digital media, including libdvdcss2 and Win32 codecs will no longer be available.  The DVD Encryption Library, libdvdcss2, enables Linux media players to play encrypted DVDs, and VideoLAN is the only Debian source for this package.

For more information and ways to make your opinion heard, visit VideoLAN site and EUCD info.