I'm curious why no one ever brings up the legal status of VLC. It's an incredibly popular program, and is likely illegal in the US. Their FAQ (http://www.videolan.org/support/faq.html) used to make this explicit, mentioning who and where you'd have to send payment for patent royalties and that decoding DVDs is against the DMCA, whereas now any mention is relegated to the legal section (http://www.videolan.org/legal.html), where they encourage you to make your own judgment.
The USA is not the world. Many US software is illegal in other countries, that doesn't mean we need to keep telling everyone that (say) some software is illegal in China everytime it comes up.
VLC is far from the only project to face this problem unfortunately. The Linux Mint devs likewise state it is "designed in Ireland and conforms to both Irish and European law", something H-Online talks about: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/HealthCheck-Linux-Mint...
Wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20091201230711/http://www.videola...