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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."
But this judgement goes in the opposite direction of the EMI case, by a Versailles appeal juge. They said EMI could apply the copy protection scheme on audio-CD, given that the costumers knew what they bought. The court asked EMI to give 10 000E to UFC-Que choisir to repair the moral damage, since this system cause some players not to read their audio-CDs. http://www.clubic.com/actualite-19778-la-protectio n-dvd-rendue-illegale-.html/
The answer IS 42.
I like the French. They cut through the crap, and they have pretty girls. Like that court ruling that you could pirate stuff, as you'd already paid the "piracy" tax on the blank CDs. Rock on, La France.
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The French are invaded by the MPAA. Resistance crumbles within the hour.
-ShadowRanger
No wonder people called them Freedom Fries. It seems the French are endowed with the natural freedoms us Americans have become used to losing.
But the french! They hate google! They didn't support our war! They... they... put mayonnaise on their fren- freedom fries! They're freaks! They're cheese-eating surrender monkeys! I don't care if they gave us the statue of liberty or helped us in the war of independence! They... they... [head explodes]
Source (linked to by the boingboing article)1 3
http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?page_id=1
UFC-Que Choisir (a French consumer protection organization) has been granted a prohibition on DVD copy protection devices by the Paris Court of Appeal, these devices having been judged to be incompatible with private copying rights.
Arnaud Devillard, 01net., April 22, 2005 at 7:28pm
What consumer protection groups have not yet succeeded in gaining for CDs, they have just obtained for DVDs. On April 22nd, the Paris Court of Appeal prohibited the use of DVD-based copy protection systems. The reason? The incompatibility of this practice with private copying rights.
Two companies, Les Films Alain Sarde and Studio Canal, thus suffered a serious setback after having won the case in the Court of First Instance at the end of April 2004.
UFC-Que Choisir latched onto the case of a consumer who was unable to copy a DVD of Mulholland Drive, a David Lynch film produced by Alain Sarde and Studio Canal, onto a video cassette. This person wanted to watch the film at his mother's, who did not have a DVD player. The strict familial context mandated for the exercise of private copying rights was therefore applicable.
The tribunal also faulted the DVD producers for lack of consumer information. This was not entirely absent but was judged to be insufficient. The label "CP" for "Copy Protected" was indeed present on the jacket, but in "small characters" and not sufficiently explicit.
A worrying judgement for the French Video Producers' Association.
Les Films Alain Sarde and Studio Canal have one month to unblock their DVDs. At the same time, Alain Sarde and Universal Pictures Video France must pay 100 euros in damages to the consumer in question. The same two companies, and Studio Canal, must also pay him 150 euros as well as 1,500 euros to the consumer association.
On the other hand, the court refused the request for damages and interest by UFC-Que Choisir against Studio Canal. The consumer association admitted to a legal misstep on its part, having chosen the wrong target for its request. The court also refused to release a judiciary communiqué on the decision.
It goes without saying, however, that UFC-Que Choisir is more than satisfied, as the damages and interest were not the main object of the case. This was rather the acceptance of its argument regarding private copying. This, and the fact that the decision can be applied to other cases "as long as the original DVD was purchased legally," says Gaëlle Patetta of the association's legal department.
But for the delegate general of the Video Producers' Association, Jean-Yves Mirski, the decision is "worrisome". Not having had the time to analyze the decision in detail, the VPA has not yet decided whether to appeal the decision to a higher court (the Court of Cassation). But this is far from out of the question.
In any case, according to Jean-Yves Mirski, this judicial turn of events "directly contradicts the European Copyright Directive." The latter permits the use of copy protection systems. This will certainly not make future legal action on this subject any simpler.
You mean the big statue in New York? I guess slashdot really IS late with the news lately!
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
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.
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.
Oh, i could think of a few...
Ummm, this is France - they have hot lesbian scenes in darned toothpaste commercials.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
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.
There is another good reason to buy DVDs in France. They are an excellent new tool for learning the language.
In North America, most new DVDs come with language choices. Most new DVDs are Hollywood productions and their original audio is in English. There is a subtitle set in English for the deaf. This is a great tool for learning English as a Second Language because the student can read the words as they are spoken. Even if the student's grasp of English is not yet to the point where the words can be understood, it is still an important learning tool.
The hardest part of learning a language like French or English is separating the stream of spoken phrases into individual words. In learning Romance languages like French and Spanish from English (and vice-versa), the vocabulary isn't the biggest problem because 50% of the words are the same. It's the rhythms of the pronunciations that is so hard to understand. Being able to see the words being spoken on the screen as they are being said goes a long way to understanding what is being said after getting an initial mastery of the language's basic vocabulary and grammar structure.
Hollywood films have a big problem with this learning approach, however. The audio and subtitles are translated by different teams and they never match. For this learning technique to work, you need an exact match between the spoken dialog and the subtitles.
Movies made in France and put on DVD do have this needed exact match.
This is a great tool for learning a language and I suggest giving it a try. However, I would not recommend learning French if you are living in the US. Spanish is the most important foreign language to learn at this time.
In Canada, however, definitely go with learning French if you are a native English speaker. The first time that you go from Kamloops to Chicoutimi you'll see instantly how smart that it was to take a little time fooling around with audio and subtitles on your DVD player. Even if all your friends do tell you that there isn't any real reason to learn any French because you'll never ever use it. You will.
French movies used to the coolest films on the planet for a short period in the early 1960s and a major contender at all other times. The French invented cinema even if Edison invented motion pictures. But lately French movies have become either really stupid or really stupid and boring. For that reason very few of them actually make it to the US as DVD releases. Or they get filmed in English and dubbed into French. Usually these dub translations have the audio/title mismatch problem. A really great movie to start with is "La Femme Nikita" from early 1990s. Unfortunately, few of the Nouvelle Vague films from the 1960s have both French and English subtitles. And many have not aged well: becoming boring and incomprehensible over the decades. The two best French New Wave films still worth watching are "Jules And Jim" and "La Jetee", both from 1962.
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
it's easier to resist when you'll, oh, get shot for resisting. Really, France surrendering to Germany is something that we criticize them far too much for. If Germany had, say, bordered the States . . . remember that at the time the U.S. didn't even really have a military force to speak of, compared especially to the German Reich's forces. Nearly anyone could have been steamrolled.
Furthermore, while we make a big deal of our sacrifices in WWI, we did it from the safety of distance; soldiers went over, but the threat to North America was never there. Meanwhile, the horror of war was literally in the backyards at best of the countries in Europe. The French especially had a rough time of it, and just in general Europe was pretty much experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The German forces just overwhelmed them; the military might was just too much to bear (and, it would be quite some time before American production and conscription raised enough military force to be able to help even if it had been the popular opinion). No, France, though admittedly acting with much defeatism, was outmatched, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. The strategic reserve, which had saved France in the First World War, was nonexistent. General de Gaulle managed to forestall the fate of Paris for quite some time, but eventually the crushing weight of German reinforcements.
And if we're going to berate France, then berate Britain at the same time; great friends that they are, they hastily pulled their forces out of the continent as France was being overrun (of course, this was strategically the only sane option at the time, but since when did logic and historical accuracy have anything to do with these kinds of accusations?).
The bottom line is that the causes aren't so straightforward as to just be "oh, those French pansies". It seems to me almost as if the current trend of "belittle the French" might stem more from modern annoyance in the States with France's political opposition to current administrative doctrine than any historical accuracy or fairness. This whole meme is quite suspect.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!