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
For anyone wondering:
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?
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.