I guess it's possible that holds, I'm not familiar with AACS enough. Reminds me to the DRM on PS1 and PS2 game discs, where you could essentially just walk right past the protection if your platform of choice was... PC. Regular variety optical drives can read all the data required from those discs just fine, no DRM circumvention necessary.
According to our lawyer, the "effectively controls access" bit in the DMCA is meant to be interpreted as whether it provides a "speedbump" or not, not in the sense whether there's a published method for cracking it, or if there are layman-accessible tools for doing so (unsure about the commonality of the practice aspect). But in the aforementioned case, there's no speedbump. The way that AACS idea is presented, it suggests to me that given the right circumstances this should be true for AACS as well, although I'd be surprised if that's a thing. I thought VLC and others rely on the keystores that ship with CPU microcode updates.
Edit: how long does ripping usually take for you? Maybe it's not a straight dumping process (where the AACS protection is actually circumvented) but a decrypt (using your CPU's keystores) and reencode? This would explain things pretty well. You'd also be magically in the legally green again :)
Edit #2: apparently not, not sure why I thought that CPU microcode was relevant here, apparently they don't ship keystores of any kind. Upon further interrogation, it just seems that the method of operation is different: libaacs will simply expect to be provided the decryption keys, and then how you got those keys becomes the problem (in the United States at least).
No, you're interpreting "speedbump" too literally. Cracking CSS to access DVD content is still illegal in the US, because it serves as an additional step that you do in order to perform the access. That's the meaning I was going for, that it's a nuisance, something that gets in the way.
This is in contrast with my PS1/PS2 example, where a PC disc drive reads the disc as normal, and you access all the content needed from it as normal. The DRM scheme doesn't participate in the interaction whatsoever, it's inert (hence, ineffective).
According to what I've learned from gpt4o and the legal texts anyways (not a lawyer).
According to our lawyer, the "effectively controls access" bit in the DMCA is meant to be interpreted as whether it provides a "speedbump" or not, not in the sense whether there's a published method for cracking it, or if there are layman-accessible tools for doing so (unsure about the commonality of the practice aspect). But in the aforementioned case, there's no speedbump. The way that AACS idea is presented, it suggests to me that given the right circumstances this should be true for AACS as well, although I'd be surprised if that's a thing. I thought VLC and others rely on the keystores that ship with CPU microcode updates.
Edit: how long does ripping usually take for you? Maybe it's not a straight dumping process (where the AACS protection is actually circumvented) but a decrypt (using your CPU's keystores) and reencode? This would explain things pretty well. You'd also be magically in the legally green again :)
Edit #2: apparently not, not sure why I thought that CPU microcode was relevant here, apparently they don't ship keystores of any kind. Upon further interrogation, it just seems that the method of operation is different: libaacs will simply expect to be provided the decryption keys, and then how you got those keys becomes the problem (in the United States at least).