German Library Allowed To Crack Copy Protection

AlexanderT writes "The EU Directive 2001/29/EU (also known as the European Copyright Directive) has made it "a criminal offence to break or attempt to break the copy protection or access control systems on digital content such as music, videos, eBooks, and software". Since today, at least in Germany there is one notable exception: The Deutsche Bibliothek, Germany's national library and bibliographic information center, has received a "license to copy", i.e. the official authorization to crack and duplicate DRM-protected e-books and other digital media such as CD-Audio and CD-Roms. The Deutsche Bibliothek achieved an agreement with the German Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the German Booksellers and Publishers Association after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works."

Comments

8-bit museum

[Neo-Rio-101]

Sweet! It will now be able to legally store the complete collection of cracked Commodore 64 disk games!

Re:8-bit museum

[zakezuke]

Sweet! It will now be able to legally store the complete collection of cracked Commodore 64 disk games!

Oh joy. Eternaly preserved load screens with "Cracked by xxxxxx" "Greetz to...." and "k-rad 0-day vvarzz". And worse yet... eternaly preserved bogus hex-edited credits that say "Cracked by Kaptain K Mart".

Bond. Johannes Bond.

[Anonymous Coward]

EU License to Crack.

Re:Quick Question

[dhalgren]

IANAL, but I believe you've just deduced the existence of 'precedence'.

ugh.. did NOBODY catch this yet?

[techarnate]

The jerky who wrote this thing up obviously confused "Phonographic" with uh... something a little different.

"annoy teenage school boys". HELLO. DUMBARSE. FLAGRANT STUPIDITY REIGNS YET AGAIN.

what a toolbox.

----

(incarnate) hey cres, I know what you're thinking right now
(incarnate) " "
(cres) i dont get it

Cracking? By whom?

[RenHoek]

Where will they get the know-how, once the MPAA and RIAA have reached their ultimate goal of exterminating all reverse-engineers?

I don't see the gray-hair-in-a-knot granny librarian soft-icing her way through the latest Safedisc protection...

Feeding them their own medicine

[shish]

Is it a criminal offence to break or attempt to break the copy protection (rot26) on digital content such as this post?

Re:Why does his link not work?

[slavemowgli]

Oh, come on, six months is nothing. There are trivial bugs in Mozilla, for example, that haven't been fixed in six *years*... Just give it some time. With luck, your grandkids will see this feature implemented. :)

Re:Teenage school boys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I too thought it was a strangely sexist and agist remark that only teenage boys are interested in the library.

Distribution

[wintaki]

The big question is whether they will be permited to distribute the crack they make. I would be very interested in obtaining German library crack.

Re:Why does his link not work?

[QuantumG]

If you really care I will implement this feature for you. Just make a $50 (US) donation to my Sourceforge Project and I'll get right on it. Of course, there's no guarentees that my patch will be accepted and there's even less chance that Slashdot will pick up the change. But hey, at least you will be doing something instead of complaining.

Re:German Phonographic Industry

[Lisandro]

Porn is important everywhere, you insensitive clod! *hugs his porn box*

Re:German Phonographic Industry

[ysegalov]

Shnell, Shnell!! (99% of scenes from German-speaking porn movies)