Legality
The "XBMC Foundation", the non-profit 501(c) tax-exempt organization behind the XBMC project, is legally represented by the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center), which assists XBMC project and its developers legal matters such as copyright, trademark, and branding questions, as well as economic issues such as handling donations and sponsors that help the project with expenses for dedicated hosting service, and activities such as going to developer conferences, trade fairs and computer expos to tech demo XBMC, meeting with potential new developers, gain publicity to attract additional users, and more.
XBMC's source code for all its supported platforms is made publicly available by Team XBMC under the open source GNU General Public License Version 2 license. The group currently maintains a Git repository for this source code.
Back when Team XBMC supported it, executable versions of XBMC for Xbox could not be legally distributed. This is because XBMC for Xbox required Microsoft's Xbox Development Kit in order to be compiled. The only publicly available executable versions of XBMC for Xbox were compiled and distributed by third parties. This limitation was given as one of the reasons the group eventually dropped Xbox support from XBMC. XBMC binaries for all other platforms that XBMC supports (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and iOS) are legal to distribute by the XBMC project.
XBMC can also optionally be compiled with libdvdcss to support playing back DVD-Video movies encrypted using the CSS (Content Scramble System) encryption. Since it is not a member of DVD Forum, the XBMC project is not contractually obliged to insert user operation prohibition such as disallowing fast-forward or skipping during trailers and ads in DVD-Videos. The legal status of libdvdcss is thus questionable in several nations, the distribution of executable versions of XBMC containing which was built with this library is likely to run afoul of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in the U.S. and the EU Copyright Directive in European Union member countries which have incorporated it into national law.
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