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German Library Allowed To Crack Copy Protection

Posted by timothy on from the clashing-aims dept.

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."

32 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Right to read by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think this would be a brilliant time to point of this essay, the right to read!
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read .html

    It'll take you 5 minutes to get through but I think everyone should check it out :)

    1. Re:Right to read by nkh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But what happen when 10 years from now I want to listen to my copy-protected CD and can't do it anymore because it is protected?

      I don't want unlimited rights to the content, I want unlimited rights to listening to the content, and this is what I bought...

    2. Re:Right to read by hkmwbz · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Did you even read the text?

      "Breaking into someone's copy-protected CD" is one thing, but I don't see the relevance. Why would I break into someone else's CD? The thing is, I'm breaking into my own copy-protected CD. I bought the CD, it's mine.

      Is it wrong to "break into" my own car?

      --
      Clever signature text goes here.
    3. Re:Right to read by TheOldFart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What if tomorrow DVD's are replaced by some other technology? Within a few years you no longer can find a DVD player to replace yours that just died. Now you have a collection of DVDs which contain the material you paid a license to watch. Your options are to pay again to have something you already have and paid for or to break the law and copy the data to a new medium. Why is that a crime?

    4. Re:Right to read by hkmwbz · · Score: 5, Insightful
      "You bought the right to drive your own car, not to build an exact copy of this car and sell it."
      Really! So I only have the right to drive my own car? I can't modify it? I can't change the tires when needed? Fill gasoline?

      Building an exact copy of the car and selling it would be more like creating CDs with someone else's copyrighted work, and selling them. But that's not what I'm talking about at all. I am simply talking about the right to do with my own CD as I damn well please.

      You really should go back to analogy school and get your shit sorted out. Your analogies suck.

      --
      Clever signature text goes here.
    5. Re:Right to read by nkh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What if tomorrow DVD's are replaced by some other technology?

      There is a problem already happening right now: I still use old programs on my 386, programs I can't use anymore on Windows 9X or even XP (shared-memory, not enough EMS...). I have to install emulators to use them and even "crack" their copy protection just to launch them.

    6. Re:Right to read by cpt+kangarooski · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yours is a stupid comment, but I'll respond to it anyway.

      You're wrong. And lets dispense with the stupid-ass car analogy.

      When you buy a book, you buy the book completely in the absence of any further valid agreement otherwise. You do NOT just buy a right to read the book. You buy the book and get the right to do anything with it as a piece of personal property: read it, don't read it, give it away, burn it, etc.

      What you buy, basically, is the right to use the book in absolutely any way, however you see fit, the right to extend that use to others (or take it back, as you like), and the right to dispose of the book in any manner.

      This is the same whether you buy a book, or a baseball bat, or pretty much anything else.

      The most relevant thing you get is access. Access to the intangible, unownable work that is expressed within the book. That is, if you own the paperback, you can access it to read the story within. If you don't, then the owner can determine whether you get to read the book, handle it, etc. which may as a practical matter limit your access to the story it contains.

      Independently of all this, there MAY also be a copyright. A copyright is a negative right; it is not a right to do things or to allow others to do things. It is a right only to prevent other people from doing things.

      Additionally, there is only a very short list of things it pertains to: reading is not one of them. Thus while a copyright holder can prevent other people from reproducing a work, he cannot prevent other people from simply reading it.

      Thus the copyright holder cannot grant other people the right to read, since a) he can't grant rights, only promise not to himself prohibit them from doing things, and b) he has no authority over reading to begin with. Only reproduction, distribution, etc. which may, but doesn't necessarily, confer some control over access to the books, as distinct from the copyrighted works within the books.

      Now, this is only a right to prohibit others. That's important! It means that other people must derive their right to read -- aside from matters of access -- from another source. In fact, since the copyright is a right of prohibition, it means that the right to actually do those things, a right we have accepted can be temporarily curtailed, must likewise derive from a different source than the mere copyright holder.

      Because when the copyright expires, this means that the copyright holder can no longer prohibit others from doing things. Now they can exercise the right that they had all along, and do things that would've been infringing had they been done before.

      Since these things are identical to the things the copyright holder likely was doing (and remembering that the copyright never conferred on him the right to do those things, only to prohibit others (this shows up a lot where there are two authors and two copyrights, one controlling on the other)) the copyright holder must've gotten his right to do those things from the same source as the rest of us.

      That source is God. The right of free speech (which encompasses both expressing and receiving speech) is where the right to read and the right to make copies etc. come from.

      We limit this a bit in the pursuit of some of the goals of our society (c.f. libel laws, advertising regulations) but ultimately we let it go unconstrained.

      There are many practical examples of this:

      Mark Twain was a noted American author who was very much in favor of ever expanding if not perpetual copyright (since after all it would make him more money, and he was bad with money so he needed more). IMO he was kind of an asshole. He NEVER would have wanted anyone to read his books without paying per read, and NEVER would've wanted people to get to make copies of his books without paying handsomely for the privilege.

      But his books are in the public domain; I can read and reproduce them at will, for free. If he or his estate had even the slightest right to prevent this, I assure you, they'd use it as much as possible. They don't, illustrating my point, and ultimately showing us all that you are (in legal terms) a doofus.

      --
      -- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
  2. Just goes to show... by m50d · · Score: 5, Insightful

    how wrong these laws really are. If this law is preventing the library fulfilling its legal obligations, perhaps this shows it was a badly thought-out law?

    --
    I am trolling
    1. Re:Just goes to show... by konekoniku · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You're advocating the government seizure of private property without compensation here.

      To take one example of why such a concept is a bad idea, say the Department of Transportation is legally required to build roads for the betterment of society. Very few people believe that the government should be able to just kick people off their land, confiscate their houses, and bulldoze them without compensation (even with compensation, as currently exists under eminent domain laws, this is a very controversial issue).

      Granted, the damage you do to the value of intellectual property by copying it is much less than the damage done to the value of real estate by bulldozing it, by the underlying concept is very much the same.

    2. Re:Just goes to show... by Alsee · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your point actually provides a perfect example to clarify the *correct* understanding of copyright.

      Just look at what happens after X years. It goes to the public domain. That would be a seizure of the property, to place it into the public domain. And that is done for the public benefit, right?

      Whoops! It would be illegal for the government to do that without paying the owner compensation for taking his property! So either the expiration of every copyright and patent is an illegal seisure by the government, or there is something wrong with the model we just laid out.

      I'm going to specifically refer to the US legal system (it's the one I know), but the theory should be pretty generally valid. If you actually read the Supreme Court ruling on the basis of copyright and patent laws, they make it perfectly clear that the fundamental state of "intellectual creations" is that they lie in the public domain. To any extent that it is "property", it is public property. This is the point where copyright and patent law come into the picture. They were created to encourage more intellectual creation and to encourage them to be contributed to the public domain. A limited bundle of copy rights or patent rights is taken from the public and temporarily given to the creator. That taking from the public is done for the public benefit.

      Which now makes it perfectly clear why library copying and fair use and other premitted copying and use is not a taking from the copyright holder. The copyright holder was never granted exclusive rights to those uses in the first place. The bundle of rights given to the copyright holder does not include any right to object to this library usage.

      The US Supreme court has directly ruled that copyright is a limited "bundle of rights" and that it is NOT some ordinary peice of propery. And while copyright infringment is a violation of the law, the Supreme Court ruled that it does not equate to theft. Copyrighted works are covered by copyright law, not property law.

      The term "intellectual property" is very bad because it gives the impression that the normal implications of property law apply. It leads to erroneous conclusions about copyright, like the appearance that the expiration of copyright is a "taking" from the "property owner". People often rationalize fair use and other copyright exceptions as a "taking" from the owner for the pubic benefit. Both are backwards logic. The expiration of copyright is merely the expiration of certain rights the public has loaned to the creator. Any copying and usage that is leagally non-infringing is simply something which was never given to the creator in the first place.

      -

      --
      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
  3. In Australia by digitalchinky · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I know working for DSD all of the laws relating to 'intercept of communications' are also valid for joe public - meaning what I do in the lab, the public can also do without repercussion from law enforcement.

    It seems odd that a library should be alowed to do something, yet the German public can not. Was it to affect me, I'd lobby against the law. Write politicians and such. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, though such exemptions are usually a good start for more stupid laws.

  4. This is important by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This is one of the primary reasons that DRM/copy protection needs to be less restrictive (or better yet done away with).

    It is important that knowledge and information be available to all now, and years down the track. Particularly if the company that made the DRM is no longer around, or the hardware no longer made.

    Information needs to be preserved and accessible and useful for all generations, not just for a companies short term profit.

  5. Bond. Johannes Bond. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    EU License to Crack.

  6. Now, if only they could decompile stuff too... by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Cracking copy protection on books and music is great, but what about software? N years from now we'll be able to read the books, but all the old abandonware will be useless because the source code is long gone... And no, emulation doesn't cut it because you can't make derivative works.

    (BTW, I do realize that software isn't included in their mandate, but it's still an important related issue!)

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  7. More EUCD Information by MartijnH · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's also a great site on the EUCD

  8. Re:Uhh..okay? Library with no money? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is not about not having money or not having legit copies. The national library is allowed to copy media for archiving purposes, e.g. copy a CD to another medium to prevent loss due to decay or to preserve the data after the CD format has become obsolete.

  9. Copyright: for the betterment of society by Gopal.V · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I've heard this a LOT about copyright being there to promote innovation , but most people forget the "for the betterment of society" part of it. altruists.org has the right ideas, but nobody with any real clout has said it so far. Until Now !!

    Reworking Copyright pretty much covers how I feel about copyright.. (though not written by me).

    For example , Gandhi was a great proponent of "Making money is not evil" (being from a business community) unlike the England educated Nehru's socialism. People rarely distinguish between the cost of an object and it's price :).. As long as the price is not paid by society (rather than an induvidual) , copyright holds. Interestingly society profits when an induvidual pays or that's the way copyright was supposed to work.

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
  10. But how will they do it? by jlar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At least in the Danish implementation of the EU copyright directive it is illegal to produce, import, spread, sell, lease out, advertise for or in a commercial setting own products or components that are subject to advertised as usable for circumventing technological protection measures, only have limited use besides circumvention of technological protection measures or is primarily produced to make it possible to circumvent technological protection measures.

    The German implementation is probably similar. My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?

    1. Re:But how will they do it? by term8or · · Score: 4, Informative

      My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?

      I would have thought the article tells you this. The german government wrote into law an exception that said that the German Library could produce and own tools to do it since it was impossible to carry out their legal functions without such an excemption. I would assume that this is legal since their is an excemption in the EU copyright directive to allow member states to make such exceptions (e.g)

      (34) Member States should be given the option of providing for certain exceptions or limitations for cases such as educational and scientific purposes, for the benefit of public institutions such as libraries and archives, ....

      --



      "As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig. :) " - AC
  11. Great, it doesn't solve the problem though. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The European Copyright Directive and other laws in that nature make it increasingly difficult for libraries to deliver meaningful content to their users. This is especially obviouse when it comes to university libraries.

    Take subito (http://www.subito-doc.de/) for example. It's a service provided by university libraries that let's you order copies of articles in case the relevant journal is not available in your local library. Now with universities always getting less money than actually needed, it's quite common that much of the journals you need are not available locally and so subito really provides a very useful service to students and scholars.

    However, this will probably stop in a short while as there is a legal battle raging against it brought by the same institutions that gave the Deutsche Bibliothek to crack DRM.

    To sum it up, these laws are in fact hindering innovation and research in Germany (and I'm sure also in other countries) right now and to give some special rights to one library won't change that.

  12. Cracking? By whom? by RenHoek · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

  13. Re:Quick Question by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Isn't law supposed to be equal for all?
    The aren't exempt from the law; they have negotiated with the publishers for permission to make copies.

    Technically they may still be breaking the law by cracking the DRM, but since they're doing so with the permission of the publishers, it'd be silly to call them to task for it.
    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  14. Re:Why does his link not work? by Gob+Blesh+It · · Score: 3, Informative

    Please visit Slashcode bug #981137, which concerns automatically hyperlinking URLs in "Plain Old Text" mode, and add a comment to show your support for a speedy resolution. No progress has been made on this trivial feature request for longer than six months.

  15. Feeding them their own medicine by shish · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    --
    I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
  16. Huh? by xstonedogx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course they reached an agreement.

    The German Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the German Booksellers and Publishers Association didn't want this agency getting the entire law overturned. A potential ally for the little guys in their struggle against these stupid laws has just been bought off.

    At the same time, they get the added benefit of making it look like these two groups are in charge of the law and can exempt people from it.

    In the US, if the RIAA said it was okay for a library to crack it's copy protection mechanisms (haha), would that be okay under the DMCA?

    I mean, if they can do that, that seems to mean that it's okay for ANYONE who has the legal right to copy a protected work to break the copy protection mechanisms prevent that legal use.

  17. How they try to justify the decision... by AlexanderT · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The official press release states that, "Das Urheberrechtsgesetz sieht so genannte Schrankenregelungen vor, nach denen der Zugang zu urheberrechtlich geschützten Werken zu bestimmten Zwecken, wie zum Beispiel für wissenschaftliche und kulturelle Nutzungen, zulässig ist. Die letzte Novelle des Gesetzes, deren einschlägige Regelungen im September 2004 in Kraft getreten sind, sieht hierfür ausdrücklich die Möglichkeit von Vereinbarungen zwischen Verbänden vor, um diese Nutzungen auch von kopiergeschützten Medien zu ermöglichen."

    I think they are referring to this particular revision in the German copyright law, which apparantly states that associations such as the Phonographic Industry have the right to allow particular institutions, such as the National Library, to duplicate copyright-protected media (for the sake of science and culture).

    Alex,
    MobileRead.com

  18. In Sweden...:D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Haha funny. A ruling from a couple of week ago in Sweden made it legal for anyone to crack programs and other schemes as long as it is for personal use. You are also allowed to distribute the cracked software to personal friends.

    (This is the case against the cracker group DOD, Drink or Die. While the American members all got jailed the Swedish member (who actually did most of the cracking) was freed of all charges)

    And yes, Sweden is also in the EU but thankfully our local laws can override BS laws like this (i think)

  19. Re:Quick Question by Urkki · · Score: 3, Interesting
    • Isn't law supposed to be equal for all?
      If Joe Sixpack kills someone and is forgiven, why shouldn't anyone else be? While that is an extreme (and criminal) analogy, it is unfair that the law does not treat everyone equally.

    Not really, circumstances matter. An extreme example: an enemy soldier that kills soldier on your side in a battle is not guilty of murder even though he's an enemy (and vice versa your side killing enemy soldiers). But if you purposefully kill a soldier on your side, you're not only guilty of murder, but possibly of treason/sabotage also, even if you're a soldier too.

    Do you call that unfair, too?

    • I'm sure a good lawyer could argue out this point - if X can be exempted, why can't Y be exempted if his reasons are quite similar?

    Well, in this case it'd mean the lawyer would have to show that Y has legal (or moral or somesuch) obligation to do something which requires breaking the copy protection... I wouldn't bet on success, no matter how good the lawyer was at twisting words.
  20. Re:Quick Question by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Uhm, no one negotiated anything with me. No extortionist publisher association has any rights to give permissions for my works to anyone.

    Of course, anything (software, documentation, game data) I ever published as myself went with a free license -- and they're pretty useless for a library, but that certainly isn't the case for a majority of authors. Remember: RIAA, MPAA, and in this case, GFPI and GBPA are not everything.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  21. Re:Teenage school boys? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  22. Re:Quick Question by Gone+Jackal · · Score: 3, Informative

    The EUCD [http://ukcdr.org] explicitly states:

    (30) The rights referred to in this Directive may be transferred, assigned or subject to the granting of contractual licences, without prejudice to the relevant national legislation on copyright and related rights.
    and:
    (33) The exclusive right of reproduction should be subject to an exception to allow certain acts of temporary reproduction, which are transient or incidental reproductions, forming an integral and essential part of a technological process and carried out for the sole purpose of enabling either efficient transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or a lawful use of a work or other subject-matter to be made. The acts of reproduction concerned should have no separate economic value on their own. To the extent that they meet these conditions, this exception should include acts which enable browsing as well as acts of caching to take place, including those which enable transmission systems to function efficiently, provided that the intermediary does not modify the information and does not interfere with the lawful use of technology, widely recognised and used by industry, to obtain data on the use of the information. A use should be considered lawful where it is authorised by the rightholder or not restricted by law.
    Take a look at the text for similar clauses. In other words, if I understand this correctly, this is firstly a question of academic or research usage, secondly a matter of agreement which can be made between any party and the copyright holder.

    This doesn't mean that the law sucks any less, but that this agreement is nothing unusual, and has nothing to do with "special rights" granted to a particular class of people/organisations. I haven't been able to find the actual text of the agreement, though. It could be that the National Library in Germany will be paying copy-fees, or similar, for their reproductions.

    --

    "Oh Bother", said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."

  23. Pretty Meaningless by MunchMunch · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This would be important if the German National Bibliothek had somehow negotiated a way to ensure that non-DRMed copies will be made available to them for the library archives. As it is, they've only really negotiated the ability to archive for maybe another five to ten years, as by then content will more likely than not simply not be crackable.

    I only need to point to the TCPA/Palladium/locked-bios architectures that pop up every so often--if you're someone who thinks DRM will 'always be crackable as long as the content can be seen,' I have to suggest that maybe you aren't fully taking in the DRM onslaught that is about to take place. If content decoding only takes place in your speakers, monitor, etc, with watermarked/recorder-distorting tech within the images themselves, are you really prepared to crack open your monitor and speaker, braving deadly electrical currents, to solder around a connection or two in order to get a clean signal? What about when it all happens within a single piece of silicon?

    The German Bibliothek basically won the rights they already had before the EU/CD and which any logical person would argue they had as a matter of course. What they've lost in this 'victory' is the future.