The underlying motivation of the encryption on DVD's goes beyond preventing piracy. It's about making sure you cannot skip past the ads at the start of the movie. They needed a mechanism to require all DVD players to respect the flags on a DVD that say "this cannot be skipped", and did that by pushing it into the 1996 WIPO treaty that you must have anti-circumvention laws that prohibit people from breaking the encryption on copyrighted materials without the permission of the rights holder. Only licensed players are decrypting with permission. VLC is not a licensed player, so VLC often runs afoul of such laws.
Just because the patents expire doesn't make the anti-circumvention laws go away. Those laws only stop applying once the copyright on the DVD expires, in a century or so.
Well, those anti-circumvention laws, for example in Germany, only apply in some cases. For example, as soon as software is included on the CD, too, breaking the DRM becomes legal.
Just because the patents expire doesn't make the anti-circumvention laws go away. Those laws only stop applying once the copyright on the DVD expires, in a century or so.