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CSS of DVDs Ruled 'Ineffective' by Finnish Courts
An anonymous reader writes "The CSS protection used in DVDs has been ruled "ineffective" by Helsinki District Court. This means that CSS is not covered by the Finnish copyright law amendment of 2005 (based on EU Copyright Directive from 2001), allowing it to be freely circumvented. Quoting the press release: ' The conclusions of the court can be applied all over Europe since the word effective comes directly from the directive ... A protection measure is no longer effective, when there is widely available end-user software implementing a circumvention method. My understanding is that this is not technology-dependent. The decision can therefore be applied to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as well in the future.'"
It's an interesting concept though - if you can crack the system, and the cracks are easily obtainable in enduser products, then it is - for the purposes of the courts - not really encrypted. I like that thinking.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That might have been true in the past. In the age of the Internet, cracks can almost instantly become widespread.
Res publica non dominetur
The alternative would be for the courts to examine the protection method and decide (without any empirical evidence) whether the method is effective. That will never work. Frankly, I think the court's ruling is a huge victory for us - because it means that crappy security systems will eventually lose any protection under copyright law.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
While it seems odd, the global Internet makes it a reasonable possibility.
If a crack is available openly in places where it is legal, and you can get to those cracks from within a country where it is illegal, then I could still come to the conclusion that the protection is ineffecetive simply because anyone who wanted to circumvent it would trivially be able to, even if no laws in that country had yet been broken.
Nothing strange there IMHO, considering the following:
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The nice Judges in the Helsinki District Court have decided that, with the wide-spread use of DeCSS, CSS no longer achieves it's objective. So rather than make criminals out of all the Linux users in Finland (- those who don't watch DVDs on their computers) they have rightly stated that DeCSS isn't an effective encryption mechanism, and thus, it isn't any more illegal to bypass the CSS than it would be if the DVD in question were unencrypted.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Wish I had some mod points. That's the funniest goatse post I've seen since it became tired (which was about 5 minutes after it was first posted).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Decrypting DVDs and violating copyrights are not the same thing. There are plenty of reasons I have for decrypting CSS without the DVD-CCA's approval which do not violate copyright law in any way.
Your linkage of unauthorized decryption with violating copyright law is exactly what the "mafiaa" would like for you to believe. You've fallen into their trap. You have lost. Have a nice day.
There's a very distinct (and important!) difference between bypassing enforcement technology and violating copyright.
Copyright law spells out how to tell if a use of copyrighted works is infringing or not, and provides a list of examples of non-infringing use.
However, enforcement technology may well prevent you from doing any sort of copying; even what is explicitly provided as an example of allowable use! Bypassing the enforcement technology for this purpose is clearly not a violation of the owners copyright.
So, circumventing the enforcement tech, and violating copyright are two seperate things.
Now, to continue on a slightly different topic... Why should circumvention be illegal in the first place? Copyright law already handles every case where someone who is circumventing the enforcement is doing something you'd classify as wrong. It seems to add redundancy, and more importantly, target a new class of people... namely those who are trying to excersize thier fair-use rights.
I'll leave it up to you to speculate who could want such legislation and why they'd want it. I'm pretty sure you can figure out my thoughts on it, I'll leave you to develop your own.
Why should circumvention be illegal in the first place?
Because the satellite TV companies, and more recently the movie industry, bought up a lot of Senators and Representatives and got some legislation passed?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Not everyone is subject to the same law stopping reverse engineering. All that is needed is for someone to crack the encryption somewhere it is legal then distribute it so that it is widespread. Then everyone in Europe at least can use it.
I'm sure there's something missing here and I doubt any of that would really work but we can dream can't we.
XePhi Computers sell really cheap Linux CDs! http://www.xephi.co.uk
I didn't say why *is* it illegal, I asked why *should* it be illegal... :P
The answer you gave is to why it is.
"Does that seem a bit wrong to anyone else?"
No, in the same way watching a DVD disc that someone shoplifted is not the same as actually shoplifting the DVD in the first place.
The judgement seems to be along the lines of "the crack is so widely available, that it's not really even definable as an encryption system anymore". It's like if you leave your front door key under the mat (or in some other insanely obvious place) and then a buglar uses it to open the front door to your house and burgle it. Your insurance company won't normally pay out because effectively, you didn't really lock your door at all.
No. DRM says that when you leave your house, someone ELSE controls the key and locks your door, and decides under what conditions you're allowed to have your key back to enter your own house. This ruling just says that if the key to your house is widely available on the Internet, you're allowed to use that widely-available key to enter your own house.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)