Europe To Adopt Strict Internet Copyright Law

sydb writes: "The EU has adopted what looks like the equivalent of the US DMCA. Details are here. One effect of these laws is to make it illegal to break encryption on copyright material. Depressing news." The EU seems to have discovered not only the Information Society (their caps) but has provided "a detailed exhaustive list of exceptions to the reproduction right and right of communication to the public ... the list is exhaustive which means that no other exception may be applied."

Comments

Re:can someone explain...

[clare-ents]

Reasons to break encryption on copyrighted materials :

To convert it to another format to use on a different playback media
[e.g. to decrypt audio to allow me to burn a CD to play in my discman]
[e.g. to covert a DVD to VHS to allow me to watch it on the upstairs TV]
[e.g. to view an e-book on my palm pilot]

To generate an archive
[e.g. to convert all my e-books to plain text so I can search them automatically]
[e.g. to extract the lyrics from my online music collection to allow me to search them]

To write my own viewer
[e.g. to write a DVD decoder that allows me to fastforward through the adverts]
[e.g. to rewrite an audio player to do soundprocessing on the way to my soundcard to fake surround sound / EQ the frequency response for my speakers]

To allow me to quote from a work
[e.g. To produce a comparison of two e-books by quoting the relevant passages]

To allow me to view a work as I choose
[e.g. To allow me to snapshot individual frames of a cartoon to find out how it was drawn.]

To make a security copy of the media
[e.g. to copy a CD incase of theft of the original]

To copy off a friend to replace a destroyed copy
[e.g. to replace a CD with a CDR burnt from a friend who owns the same album after the dog ate mine]

The story is

EU makes it legal for copyright holders to enforce arbitrary restrictions on what you are allowed to do with media you paid for.