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French Courts Ban DRM on DVDs
blamanj writes "According to a story on Boing-Boing, the French courts have banned DRM copy-protection on DVDs, because it is a consumer right to make a backup or to change formats (in this case, to VHS). Original story (in French) is also available."
Bless you France for your gift of liberty.
Unfortunately, just because the French are creating national law which "allows" them to copy DVDs, doesn't mean that DVD manufacturers are going to adhere to that law - or for that matter, start shipping disparate versions of movies to France. It would be a massive cost issue.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
just a few days ago, another court said a CD-audio can be copy-protected, under the only condition that the customer is warned before he boughts.
Too true. However, this may make programs such as DeCSS legal in France, which means French servers can make the program available.
If you disagree with any of thus, feel free to email me and I can explain to you further why it is that I believe you are stupid: joe.hacker@gmail.com
God bless!
Yes, I know it's a stupid email address.
Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.
Wow. Something good coming out of France. Who'da thought?
I wonder what will happen here. The French market is not so large that it gets all DVDs made specifically for it. Instead, they tend to use multiple languages and market to a lot of Europe at the same time. If that is the case, do the big media companies stop selling in France or do they start selling non-protected DVDs more broadly? This could get interesting. I wonder if France's actions will snowball or make it a backwater for digital media.
True, but it also should mean that DVD copying software and region-free, macrovision free players will be not only widely available (although they are already), but also will be legally available.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
From now on, French and Freedom are synonymous!
Vive la république française!
For me, the MPAA should be able to sell DVDs with any amount of DRM that they desire, as long as they indicate that the DVD is DRMed. I just want the right to be able to break the encryption, or even do simple things like interoperate my devices without being sued.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
That's the problem with you Americans: no subtlety - "Yer either with us or against us!". Turns out the real world is more complex than that.
I think the case was easy to understand, easier for a Judge to agree.
This is after a man who was not able to copy a DVD he purchase to a VHS cassette so he can watch it at his mother's place. Which is considered private copying and is a consumer right in France.
Until it affects you, and you can see the problem, most people dont understand the issue. This was the perfect example of people seeing the outcome of copyprotection on something you bought and no longer have control over how you use it.
Of course, I have no idea if I can copy a DVD to VHS tape legally for my own personal use in America, with the laws being passed on riders on bills for IRAQ, who knows.
Your humor aside, I'm surprised at how many people in America ask similar questions in a serious way, as if they really do want someone to tell them how to think. Well, some of us totally ignored the anti-French propaganda of a couple of years ago. We think for ourselves.
Any time you put yourself in a position where you allow others to think on your behalf, you become completely dependent on their honesty and integrity. Throw in the saying about power corrupting, and you have a recipe for disaster every single time. Think for yourself.
Agreed. The government should not be involved at all. Then a nice balance between producer and consumer rights can be achieved. However, when I say that the government should not be involved, that includes laws like the DMCA. Government should do nothing more than provide the framework for the MPAA to take individual copyright infingers to court, and get its head out of the details of making or breaking DRM technology.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
If you really believe in free speech you should admit that Corporations and individuals both should have the right to distribute (and sell) any kind of information they want.
Unless, of course, you disagree with the ruling that Corporations have the same rights as real living human beings.
Good for you! Now, the new word of the day is "sarcasm". Go look it up.
Wow, I've never been impressed by France before today.
No interest in wine, philosophy, mathematics, religion, rugby, food or art, then?
So, maybe you could cite a case where they made the wrong decision?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If the gov't doesn't protect me, then who will? Do I have enough money to fight the MPAA/RIAA in court? Do I have enough money to buy the latest and greatest security technology? Do I have the money to support an army so that an invading country doesn't kill me? The gov't works to protect everyone in it's boarders (and sometimes outside). It may not be perfect, but it is better then nothing. Saying "anti-drm legislation is socialist and wrong" because it is a law to protect people is foolish. That is like saying "Anti-drinking and driving legislation is socialist and wrong." Again, our legislation system may not be perfect, but it is better the nothing.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Obviously, the protection systems are hurting the loyal consumers (yes, there are some, trust me) as a side effect.
.2 cents
In France, it is legal to copy your CD and DVD, and anything. What is forbidden is to widespread them around, or even worse, selling illegal copies (the latter have always been toughly sued).
But now, with these protection systems, when you damage your cd/dvd (kids scratching them, anyone ?), you've lost the benefits of them.
IMHO, i globally agree the idea that you have to pay for what you consume (stealing is BAD. final dot.) -but may disagree on the price it is sold, or the insane way the bill is dispatched to the artists and producer amongst others-.
A good thing would be to life guarantee the possible exchange of your broken/damaged CD/DVD, thus allowing them to be protected and uncopy-able. Also coming as a MUST is "stop making protection system that make your CD/DVD unusable on some legacy device" (like protected CD that could not be played on car player).
That would be a good idea. But that implies that the majors invest some money in these, and also implies the majors cares about the consumer as a whole, not only his money...
my
I'm not excited. In fact, I'm disappointed.
This is not what we should want. We don't want courts or legislation dictating how we provide our content. Just like we don't want courts and legislation dictating how we should consume our content.
Organizations should be free to encumber their products with encrypted copy protected nonsense. Just as we should be free to circumvent that nonsense.
CSS is not the problem. It's laws like the DMCA that are the problem.
They voted for socialism its their call. Personally I like it, the masses are generally too stupid to do things the way I want them to, they don't know what's good for them. Left to their own devices people would quite happily buy this crap - the market wouldn't have decided the 'right' way. The government (of the people) steps in and makes everyone do the right thing without actually forcing them to do anything - its pretty much like a union - they vote to strike, everyone has to strike, except in fact no-one is striking, the government aren't stopping people from _buying_ DRM DVD's they are just stopping people from _selling_ them.
Since the government is elected by the 'majority' they decide that everyone must play by the same rules even if the majority in fact don't agree - Its first-round the post, winner-takes-all, im sure America is familiar with those terms. In a way its just like narcotics - although I disagree with banning _some_ drugs because it doesn't actually personally affect me if people buy drugs (crime is a result of banning drugs not the other way around), however it does affect me if people buy into DRM bullshit because then I have no choice but to buy it too (if I want to buy that particular title). At the end of the day I accept both political systems and it wouldn't bother me too much either way, but America certainly isn't perfect in regards to not being a nanny state.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
But this judgement goes in the opposite direction of the EMI case
No, it doesn't. It is consistent with the audio CD case. In that, the initial question was whether suit could be brought simply for the existence of the protection. The answer was no, if it was disclosed. But the further question of whether the protection, if it interfered with proper playback, was actionable was answered in the affirmative. You can sue and win if the protection interferes with your playback of the media.
Just like in the present case you can sue and win (pending appeal) if the protection interferes with your ability to make copies of the media in a different format for the purpose of playback. Put more succinctly, you can sue and win if the protection interferes with your playback of the media, even if the playback you desire requires copying the media.
I'm pretty sure using DeCSS-like softwares has never been a problem in france, you're allowed personal copy rights, and the means you use to achieve that are up yours. DCMA thingie is only in the US you know (well for now).
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Every morning, 60 million Frenchmen wake up and think about how they can annoy the Americans. Every single day of their lives. Even before taking their first glass of wine and heading to the bakery to get their freshly-baked baguette. This is really their single most important duty to fulfill every day.
/. make it sound like we have nothing else to do of our time than to think about the mighty US of America, how to annoy it, how to counter it. Believe it or not, it happens sometimes that we have ideas, rules, laws of our own, that are not just there to be "against" the US.
Yes, I know it sounds stupid, but you guys here on
And by the way, even though you almost never see them in the US, there is actually a lot of movies produced in France. This ruling is going mostly to piss off the french movie producers. And there is absolutely no need for a "hidden agenda" to explain it.
I believe that people are naturally independent minded and disrespectful of authority. They only become mindless livestock when they've been thoroughly indoctronated in an ideology of subservient obedience. This mentality is intoduced and enforced by the school system (compulsory education is totally unacceptable in a free society) and through conservative capitalist dominated media. If the airwaves were not regulated, analog communication would be impossable because everyone would croud out the spectrum; so digital spread spectrum technology would make great advances and TV and radio would become more like the internet in that anyone who could afford the equiptment could become a media provider. Get rid of government, and corporate control of public speech will wilt away. Anarchism or Libertarianism is a much better way to destroy the corporate elites then any socialist policy. Government reforms mean that real people are not the ones taking direct action to stop a problem. Reform allows the original issue to fester under the surface. It's better to deregulate and wait for things to get bad enough to make the population take things into it's own hands and permenantly solve the problem. Besides..... if corporations can convince you to obay them, good for you, why should I get in the way? If people don't think they have fair use, let them be. If you sell yourself into slavery, you get what you deserve. Perhaps if we allow for a certain degree of social evolution, the masses will either sequester themselves to the Wal Marts and churches and leave us thinking people to ourselves or they will finally get the picture and emancipate themselves.
**I'm probably comming off as a wanna-be elitist asshole here...maybe I am being a bit radical; I'm sort of throwing some ideas out.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Who said anything about individuals giving up their rights?
I believe the grandparent was questioning the morality of corporations having rights in addition to those of their members.
Matt
I would rather see it as a consumer protection issue. Basically, if you want to sell "media" to consumers, make sure it is easy accessible and don't force the consumer into accepting various restrictions through laws OR contracts. There are many other such consumer "protecting" laws to make sure consumers have SOME protection.
We have a double-agent in the government, it both protects and abuses us. Our only hope going forward is we can swing them our way. Forbidding DRM makes things like the DMCA irrelevant. This also levels the field for a lot of hardware manufacturers. They no longer have to pay a fee to make DVD players.
The end result may be that DVDs won't be sold in France but there's this little thing called the European Union...if they refuse to sell DVDs to France, they cannot do business in the Union. So no DVDs for Europe? Doubt it.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
What would really rock is if the entire EU adopted an anti-DRM strategy. Since international businesses have to abide by EU rulings (if they want to do business in the hugh market that is the EU), such a ruling EU wide would be effectively world-wide. How do ya like them apples, MPAA?
That is precisely why France is not particularly impressed with the United States. They make all the same mistakes we do, yet we revel in our mistakes and sneer at them for theirs.
Yes, they think their culture is SO SUPERIOR. Wait, so do we. Yes, they've got dangerous xenophobic/racist undercurrents against their Muslim and Jewish populations. Wait, so do we. They engaged in a failed colonial experiment in IndoChina. Wait, so did we. They let their country get overrun by fascists in WWII, and many of them even collaborated. Wait, so did we, in 2000, and again in 2004.
Face it--we ARE the French. That's why we hate them so much.
Try selling some Nazi memorabilia in France sometime.
I'm not sure I agree with the French courts on this case. Though i strongly disagree with the US courts WRT the DMCA. I think government should just "not be involved" to this extent and let existing laws stand.
I don't see why everybody is clamoring for government interference.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
>While some fools honestly did hate the french,
:-)
> and went all out with their "Freedom Fries",
> most people didn't do much more than make >french jokes. Not to offend, but just for
> laughs.
> Also, the French deserve it.
Do not worry, we French do not hate Americans as much as we seem, we too like to make jokes.
And you deserve it too
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
Your interpretation of the basic premise of copyright law is in error. They don't own the content, they own the copyright. This right to copy is a government granted limited monopoly of producing copies of a given work. It is not up to the copyright owner to determine the legal reach of this monopoly, it is up to the courts and the legislatures. If the French courts decide that this government-granted monopoly does not extend to limiting personal copying for the purpose of transfering to a different media format, then that's just tough nuts.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
doesn't that mean there is no copyright?
from the article you linked to....
"The term "Maginot Line" has been used as a metaphor for something that is confidently relied upon despite being ineffectual. In fact, it did exactly what it was intended to do, sealing off a section of France, and forcing an aggressor around it (and the few forts of the Maginot line which were directly attacked by German armoured troops held very well)."
I gues it just depends on if you need something to bash or not.
But noone can force them to sell the DVD's with frence voice-over/subtitles....
CSS is a big problem. It's how they implement their illegal price fixing.
It's illegal to sell the same product for different prices in different markets and attempt to prevent enterprising individuals from reselling the product if the price difference is sufficient to make it profitable.
Like selling discs in the east for a buck, selling them in North America for 20 and using region coding to prevent us from ordering discs from overseas. Or selling them in North America and preventing them from being resold in Europe.
CSS and region coding aren't about copy protection at all. Copy protection is just the excuse they use to justify their price fixing measures.
It's not really that different from that RAM price fixing story that ran the last couple of days, and if there was any justice, the perps would be dealt with the same way. But, of course, there isn't any justice, just goons in government uniforms acting on behalf of the highest bidder.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Exactly.
People are keenly sensitive to custom. Even if you think you're being perfectly poilite for how your neighbourhood behave, you could unwittingly appear rude or arrogant in others. 'Neighbourhood' was a deliberate choice of word: the idea applies equally to regions of a single country and nations on different continents.
I've day-tripped to France (I live in Kent, UK). I have little more than schoolboy French, but I make the effort. More often than not, I have to resort to "Excuse-moi, parlez vous anglais?". Often, we struggle along in our respective pidgin English or French... but luckily many people in north-west France seem to have better English than my French!
It's the little things that count. If you walk into a shop, you always greet the shop keeper. Always. Back home, I'd only occasionally do that, and even then it'd just be a hurried smile and a 'Hi' as I rush through the checkout. Do that in France, and people are gonna think you're rude.
Even here in the UK, you say pleases and thankyou's to people who serve you. Sure, you don't greet in the same way the French do, but you *do* adhere to some basic courtesy. In some cultures, that's not the case. It's not unusual to find the "They're being paid to serve me, so they do not require thanking" custom, and of course the flip-side, "I'm being paid to serve them, why should they thank me?".
Basically, understand that things just work differently everywhere. When you go abroad, you most likely will cause offence at some point or another, be you American, French, British, German, Nigerian, Guatemalan, Whatever-the-hell-an. The best you can do is live, learn, and try to hold off on being judgemental until you've got a half-decent grasp on how others lead their lives.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Must be great to have a government that is not in the pockets of the corporations.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
That is far from being a uniquely french flaw.
You could say that our (US) preparations for the current war in Iraq were based far too much on the expectation that it would be similar to the 1991 gulf war.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
You wrote:
A company has--or should have--the right to sell its wares under any terms it wishes.
Not if the people (acting through their govt) decide otherwise. Corporations have EXACTLY whatever rights WE CITIZENS decide to give them. THEIR rights are determined by US. If the French govt contrains corporate rights, then it is because the fRench PEOPLE want it that way.
You see, teh American propaganda has warped your perspective. A country is supposed to be "by the people and FOR the people' not by and for the corporations.
See how that works?
So how do we get America headed in that direction? How about trying our politicians for treason?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
So you want the courts and legislation to keep out of the way and just let everybody copy everthing as they please?
Please keep in mind that all that copyright-stuff is upheld by - and only by - courts and legislation. Some people even argue that copyright is a rather late invention by those institutions, AFAIK there was no copyright about 300 years ago and earlier.
Therefore, OF COURSE they will have a say in the matter.
Freedom Fried indeed, Looks like france is much more in tune with the times than the USA
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
They already do. People don't got to Sony or Warner jails for breaking DRM. The goverment dictates, at the behest of corporations, how we - the real 'we', the we who elect supposed representatives to political positons - what can be done with content. Now if you're arguing to remove both interventions and return to no government intrusion I'm right behind you.
The overwhelming preponderance of /. readers' responses to this story seems to have been a thoughtless regurgitation of all things anti-French. I sort of feel like pointing out that, based on those posts, at least on this side of the Atlantic precisely the sort of idiotic self-centeredness you're describing holds true. The French don't think that way, no, but apparently slashdot does.
This isn't about France -- it's about the suppression of dissenting views. The entirety of the anti-French idiocy over here amounts to one big "ad hominem" attack; nobody really had an answer to Villepain's Security Council arguments, so we demonized the speaker rather than countering the speech.
(Cue jokes about how the French won the American Revolution by pitching in with their navy at the opportune moment... Oh, never mind, we're supposed to forget that one. Surrender monkeys and all that. Yeah. That stuff. Belgian fries. Etcetera.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
We have learned that like it or not we will be dragged into the world problems. We were reminded again in 2001 when a couple buildings fell, even though Bush was up to that time persuing a more isolationist policy. The US cannot be an isolationist.
We haven't been isolationist since WWII. We have troops in over 100 countries and have had them there for decades.
There's not much we can do about the world problems we get dragged into. The problem is all the world problems we create ourselves.
For example, 50 years before 9/11 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected President of Iran and installed that secular puppet dictator the Shah. 25 years ago he in turn was overthrown by an anti-American religious fanatic Ayatollah. That in turn gave Osama bin Laden his "base" to pull off 9/11.
Connect the dots.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB126/