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

Right to read

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :)

Re:Right to read

[nkh]

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...

Re:Right to read

[TheOldFart]

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?

Re:Right to read

[hkmwbz]

"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.

Re:Right to read

[nkh]

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.

Re:Right to read

[cpt kangarooski]

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.

Just goes to show...

[m50d]

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?

This is important

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Now, if only they could decompile stuff too...

[mrchaotica]

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!)

More EUCD Information

[MartijnH]

Here's also a great site on the EUCD

But how will they do it?

[jlar]

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?

Re:But how will they do it?

[term8or]

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, ....

Great, it doesn't solve the problem though.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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...

Re:Quick Question

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Huh?

[xstonedogx]

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.

In Sweden...:D

[Anonymous Coward]

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)