11mo ago

Unity bans VLC from Unity Store.

Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a "Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement." This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, "Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least)." Unity is swiftly coming to it's demise.

Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html

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For anyone wondering:
There was a plugin on Unity Store that acted a bridge between Unity and libVLC, which allowed developers to make video players inside the game engine. As the post says, it got removed.
This plugin isn't made by VideoLAN, it's made by a company named Videolabs that includes several people who supposedly have contributed a lot on VLC and FFMPEG.
The Videolan team made a blog post about this, if you want to know more: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
- VideoLabs is made up of many of the same contributors of VideoLAN, including Jean-Baptiste Kempf themself. It is arguable that this is in fact Unity banning VideoLAN's VLC bridges for media playback in Unity.
- I also thought VLC was a bit shaky on their legality as well, but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc) with more lax copyright laws, they got away with it.
  So I wouldn't blame an app store for not wanting to take on legal gray area risk.
  
  VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content
  Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?
  But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?
  
  For context.
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/if-vlc-can-ship-a-free-dvd-player-why-cant-microsoft/
  Under French law DVD and Blu-ray codecs aren't patentable and VLC is based in France. The organisation isn't breaking any laws.
  Whether using VLC in the US is the legal grey area.
  So it's not VideoLAN who might be breaking a law, it's you by circumventing the anti piracy keys in DVDs and Blurays. Millennium copyright act and anywhere that signs up to a treaty containing reciprocal copyright law might have an issue.
  Patent infringements might also be possible in the US if you edited that open source code in that country, but US to EU patent treaties don't cover software France deems unpatentable so distributing the codec is probably fine as long as it's of French origin (and non-commercial use as per the GPL licence)
  In the UK, the codec might be patentable now after Brexit interestingly but we haven't yet diverged on patent treaties with the EU yet as far as I know and we're part of the US patent treaty still.
  Similar things happened with MP3 codecs in Linux before it was also made free. You'd either be prompted to make the choice to install yourself during or after the install. Or perhaps 2 downloads offered, one with and one without.
  All to show you as an individual made the choice to use those codecs. If there were any possible damages from an individual download is would be less than $40 in licencing. So a lawyer would have to submit a case for each individual for that as a possible settlement, not even guaranteed.
  As long as a large organisation isn't liable for the codec install, it falls into "de minimis" legal territory.
  I remember a Live CD install of Ubuntu required some hoops to get codecs at one point in the distant past. I looked it up then out of curiosity.
  
  The "legal grey area" is about codec patents and dvd playback.
  
  There's no software patents in the EU, when it comes to codecs the only thing patentable would be hardware implementations and if you have one of those whoever produces your CPU/GPU already paid for a license. DVD region-locking is at least sus to the commission but they never went ahead with antitrust etc. stuff probably because the market became irrelevant, also, the industry was smart enough to make the whole of the EU a single region. DeCSS is more of a grey area and currently unsettled but a Finnish court judged it legal because the mechanism circumvented is not effective. That's a legal, not technical, thing, they're basically saying that it's closer to "circumventing" a copy blocker by disabling autostart when inserting a CD into your computer than it is to circumventing by actual decryption, which makes sense as the scheme is weak AF. That said if the industry were to upgrade the scheme they nowadays might run into a different set of anti-trust issues. Generally speaking nobody, not even the industry, really seems to care as physical media is pretty much dead.
  
  Exactly.
  Also, I think there was some question about whether it was legal to use ffmpeg under the hood depending on the use case (commercial). I imagine a plugin used inside commercial games would certainly violate licenses based on non-commercial use.
  But seeing how my original comment was received, I doubt many here are actually interested in why it may be necessary. Let the anti Unity circle jerk continue.
  
  If you're using it commercially you should be building it such that it only supports what you need, and what you need should be something not patent encumbered. Because why would you shell out money for an inferior codec when you can choose freely what to encode your stuff with.
  
  "Should" and what's actual reality in multi national copywrite / license / patent law are rarely the same. Especially in this case where you have to include other people's work (codecs and media players) just by the nature of the problem.
  
  I only told you what you should do if you don't want to get into legal trouble, that it's simple, easy, and a good idea even if it wasn't for US-specific bullshit. If people don't to act sensibly, well that's on them.
  
  I think the discussion below your comment is good, but your comment, and the community response (in the form of comment votes), illustrates a problem I have with the lemmy community.
  Counter arguments are important.
  It seems Lemmy has an even bigger problem than Reddit did with circle jerks. Any counter argument that goes against the grain is immediately pounced on here. Especially if you don't write a page long disclaimer that you don't necessarily agree with the decision, I'm one of you, etc.
  I simply pointed out that <hated company> may have had a good reason to consider <3rd party plugin> a big enough legal liability to triage out of their store for the time being, based on some half remembered related knowledge of murky legal details of the past.
  You immediately implied that I'm some sort of corporate shill, even if it was politely worded. And the community piled on in response.
  It would be nice if there was at least an attempt to understand both sides of an argument here.
  
  Are,…we,..the baddies?
  
  But what about all those highly voted articles about how OTHER social media sites are dangerous echo chambers!
  
  Very fair!
  
  Ha. The downvotes - to what seems like a reasonable reply (even if people disagree) - seem like they're proving you right :)
  
  If Unity had a problem with VLC playing copyrighted content they should have said so, not issued a takedown on LGPL grounds. Regardless of whether they're right or not from a lawyer perspective, it's a bad look for Unity to show the double standard here.
  
  but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc)
  It's French. And there's nothing shaky about it. It's even fully endorsed by the EU.
  
  Most of the people downvoting you dont seem to understand why VLC is only quasi legal in the US.
  
  Because it can read DVDs. Which is evil (because they ought to pay a license). That's all there is to it.
  
  They're stealing money from the mom and pop DVD technology license holders!!! 😡😡😡

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