"I am aware of no works or classes of works that have, because of the implementation of technical protection measures, become unavailable to persons who desire to be lawful users"
He may not be aware, but we do exist. I have a Diamond V550 AGP retail, which included a copy of Zoran's Software DVD player. Playing recent games with it necessitates using nVidia's reference drivers since Diamond, as a part of S3, no longer has access to nVidia's driver source. There are recent drivers from Diamond, but they are nothing more than the nVidia reference drivers with Diamond's InControl tools and install utility.
With the nVidia reference drivers, the Zoran softDVD - for which I hold a perfectly valid legal license - will not play DVDs. It just tells me that my hardware does not support Macrovision. The most recent drivers that will allow the DVD player to work are dated March of 1999 and are obsolete. Requiring me to use those drivers is totally unreasonable, especially given the target demographic of the V550 was gaming.
Does anyone know if people from other countries (I'm Canadian) can submit a formal response to these comments? If it's possible, I'd like to let them know that if the customer ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
This leads to the question of will this actually hurt the DeCSS case? I can see the lawyers now saying that now that ATI (And Sigma too) have released linux drivers there is no reason for people to use DeCSS.
It shouldn't hurt it. The drivers for ATI and Sigma hardware doesn't mean jack to those without that hardware. If we let them win because of this point, we won't win anything for consumer rights. I want the ability to watch DVDs whenever I want on whatever OS and hardware I want.
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He may not be aware, but we do exist. I have a Diamond V550 AGP retail, which included a copy of Zoran's Software DVD player. Playing recent games with it necessitates using nVidia's reference drivers since Diamond, as a part of S3, no longer has access to nVidia's driver source. There are recent drivers from Diamond, but they are nothing more than the nVidia reference drivers with Diamond's InControl tools and install utility.
With the nVidia reference drivers, the Zoran softDVD - for which I hold a perfectly valid legal license - will not play DVDs. It just tells me that my hardware does not support Macrovision. The most recent drivers that will allow the DVD player to work are dated March of 1999 and are obsolete. Requiring me to use those drivers is totally unreasonable, especially given the target demographic of the V550 was gaming.
Does anyone know if people from other countries (I'm Canadian) can submit a formal response to these comments? If it's possible, I'd like to let them know that if the customer ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
It shouldn't hurt it. The drivers for ATI and Sigma hardware doesn't mean jack to those without that hardware. If we let them win because of this point, we won't win anything for consumer rights. I want the ability to watch DVDs whenever I want on whatever OS and hardware I want.