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Finnish Appeals Court Rules Breaking CSS Illegal
Thomas Nybergh writes "Due to an appeal court decision from a couple of days back, breaking the not-very-effective CSS copy protection used on most commercial DVD-Video discs is now a criminal act in Finland (robo translated).
The verdict is contrary to what a district court thought of the same case last year when two local electronic rights activists were declared not guilty after having framed themselves by spreading information on how to break CSS. Back then, it was to the activists' benefit has CSS been badly broken and inneffective ever since DeCSS came out."
For a moment there, I shook my head at the idea of the courts getting involved in webpage layout.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
A better URL to a non-robo-translated english version is http://www.turre.com/blog/?p=156
There's now a proper, human made translation of Turre legal's blog entry available
At first I thought this meant the CSS in HTML/CSS and thought "Yes, finally Microsoft cant mess around with IEs rendering anymore."
What will be the impact on Linux DVD playback? "You're breaking the law by watching them, we'll have to seize your original DVD collection!"
On Finland, it is now a criminal act to play/copy DVD by using libdvdcss but if you download same movie from P2P network, it is just criticized. If you upload movie to network, it is criminal act.
So, if you do not want to be a criminal and you use GNU/Linux, download your movies from P2P network, if you dont like to use codeina (included on Mandriva Linux) to buy codecs.
I take offense at the blurb's description of CSS as "copy protection". CSS has nothing to do with copying, it is "playback protection", just like almost any other sort of encryption.
Actually the headline is incorrect - the court did NOT rule that breaking CSS is illegal but distributing the software to accomplish this is illegal - breaking the copy protection for private use IS STILL LEGAL.
So nothing changed really - media is just screwing over the whole thing as usual.
Could someone(preferably a Suomi speaker) please explain HOW in the mind of the court it's illegal to circumvent the 'protection'. Can't make it out from TFA.
If that's the case, why not just protect everything with ROT-13 and make it illegal to 'crack' it. Seriously, it the logical step. Why spend millions developing the latest copy protection when you can simply use the law to help you pretend what you've got is good enough.
The more we criminalize the behaviour of those who try to reverse-engineer or break security features, the more we are saying "we give up" to those looking to capitalize on breaking them, and the less secure we'll become.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
Crossing the street on foot against a signal is illegal.
Killing a family with an axe is illegal.
Decrypting CSS is illegal.
Having weeds in your yard taller than half a meter is illegal.
Does one word sufficiently characterize all these crimes?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Not much of a translation. That link seems mostly to be a rant about how wrong the court was. The best we get of what the court actually *said* was a two-line couple of sentences, and some single-word translations like "seemingly" as though the word "seemingly" somehow makes their judgement suspect.
Sigh.
CSS doesn't even slow down the class of people who were the main copying threat back when CSS was devised in the late '80s and early '90s. Copying and passing around DVDs over computer networks wasn't even on the horizon... people were treating software released on CD instead of floppy as being more protected just because it would take too long to download... and writable discs didn't come out until 1997. CSS doesn't do anything to stop people who can read the data off the DVD and create a new master from it to create counterfeit DVDs (often in the same factories in Asia that were making the originals), and that's what copy protection was about back then.
"Back then it was to the activists' benefit has CSS been badly broken and inneffective ever since DeCSS came out." Was that robo translated from Urdu?
I forgot to link to the translation of the blog post
My original comment is still valid, here's an excerpt from the Finnish law:
"Mità 1 momentissa sÃÃdetÃÃn, ei sovelleta, jos tekninen toimenpide kierretÃÃn salaustekniikoita koskevan tutkimuksen tai opetuksen yhteydessà taikka jos teoksen kappaleen laillisesti hankkinut tai haltuunsa saanut kiertÃà teknisen toimenpiteen teoksen saamiseksi kuultavilleen tai nÃhtÃvilleen. Teoksesta, jota suojaava tekninen toimenpide on kierretty teoksen saamiseksi kuultaville tai nÃhtÃville, ei saa valmistaa kappaletta."
A crude translation is as follows:
"What is set in moment 1 shall not be applied if the technical system is circumvented for in use in research or teaching or if the item in question, being legally acquired by the person, is circumventing the copy protection in order to allow the owner to view or hear the item. Item that is decrypted in this fashion to remove the protection shall not be copied further."
Note that the translation is very crude because I wrote it here in the silly editor adn the English isn't very good either but the bottom line stays, if the person has legally obtained a copy of the DVD and is decrypting it for personal use it is still completely legal.
This is straight from the Big Book'o'Law.
I can't believe this is still in the news. It's been cracked so long, it has already spawned the successful careers of several pre-bubble programming magicians from RIT.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/19/1148249
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
You're right... but then the court either smokes too much crack, is populated by demented baby boomers, disagrees with the law or all of the above (if I understand Valimaki's post correctly).
I do, anyone with a Linux based HTPC that can display content from commercial DVDs does. This is NOT good if it's as clear cut as the summary made it sound.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
...and now there's a real blog post in English on Turre Legal's blog.
Finland Finland Finland, A country where I quite want to be. Your mountains so lofty, your treetops so tall. Finland Finland Finland, Finland's got it all.
It is a blog entry, not some legal document. The translation is accurate.
What's the difference between encrypting and encoding? Is passwordless encryption anything more than a mere encoding of the data?!
Let's just call ASCII a way to cipher text!
I would say the crossing and the weeds correlate, and the RIAA would say the axe and the copy would correlate. And while I think this statement is funny, I also think it is not far from true.
This space up for sale.
Didn't anyone else notice that this story is over a year old? The date on the original site is 25th May 2007.
Whoa... so no more clever hacks? or is this some kind of joke by judges that hate disabled people?
Sigh. No, it is not stealing, it is copyright infringement.
Both illegal, but they are different laws.
and you will burn in hell just like the thief
as it is written so it shall be amen
The defendant can still appeal to the Finnish equivalent of Supreme Court.
Wow... With your flawless logic and profound argumentation you have succeeded in turning me into a RIAA supporter for life.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
It's not much different by nature thou - you take what you're not allowed to take (by the one owning the copyright), in many cases likely causing what's called a loss of profit in economics (if i translated it correctly).
Basically, if you haven't payed for it, you should do without! I mean, how hard can it be NOT to download a movie via bittorrent? What life-threatening consequences could it have to justify piracy?
If it weren't for the few legal uses, P2P were almost a synonym for Piracy 2 People: everyone involved supports new participants.
This is how I feel about it.
We can bear in mind that since copying a DVD doesn't involve decryption, copying is a mere copyright infringement.
However, what is 'breaking CSS'?
If 'breaking' is decrypting then playing DVDs also decrypts them.
If you have a decryption device (DVD player) and an encrypted intellectual work (DVD) subject to copyright (and DMCA/EUCD) then the Finnish court must also rule that operating a DVD player is illegal.
You can't have it both ways. Well, unless you allow a copyright holder to usurp the law and say "Decryption and decryption equipment is only illegal when I say it's illegal, and 'breaking' is decryption that I say is illegal".
It wouldn't be unheard of in this country of "lowest corruption", considering the recent scandal of election funding.
I'm ashamed to be a Finn.
Are you trolling or did you just join slashdot? It's an understatement to say this topic has been beaten to death. Go read past discussions for fucks sake.
In my opinion creating systems that restrict the use of media beyond the limits of fair use is the equivalent of stealing that "extra profit" from hundreds of millions of people. It is often called "extortion".
What life-threatening consequenses could it have to justify allowing media companies to create an artificial monopoly in an arena where their distribution services are no longer required? So they stop making movies, big deal. People have shown for thousands of years that they will create entertainment even in the absence of profits.
BTW, piracy is also a word mis-used to give the illusion of a more serious offense. Downloading has been running wild for 10 years. Using the most extreme estimates, the movie and music industries have only lost 10 percent of their revenue. I think this proves that "intellectual property rights infringement", on a personal scale, isn't causing businesses to collapse.
Another way to refute your argument is to point out that merely causing "a loss of profit" isn't against the law. Japanese car companies caused American car companies to lose a lot of profit of the past thirty years. Digital film technologies are financially killing Kodak.
Have you looked up the word "take". I don't think downloading a movie from bittorrent quite qualifies as "taking" in the classical sense. It counts in a world where you feel entitled to compensation and you don't get it. That entitlement is not a natural law and not even necessary for society to operate. It was added to the laws of most countries to encourage the development of industries that entertain the people.
Finally, I need to address "...if you haven't payed for it, you should do without!". So, if your spouse goes to a cooking class, should you be able to enjoy the food he or she cooks without paying for the class? If your neighbor hires a band that you like for a birthday party, are you obligated to slip money under the fence? You act like this is a black and white issue.
You mean you do not see the difference between a near-zero cost duplication of binary data and taking a physical object belonging to someone so that they no linger have it? What the FUCK are you doing reading a technical site with such a lack of understanding?
Anyway, that is not at all what this is about, but decryption of data you PAID FOR in the form of a DVD.
All of this assuming that there existed some way of actually enforcing the stupid law, of course. Which there isn't.
What golden rule? He who has the gold makes the rules? Sorry but that might have flown back in the day when we had to kiss the kings feet...
Now if you're talking about do unto others... well maybe some people would wish to give away their things for free (look at Linux) because they think that by giving things away someone will take it and improve on it and in turn give it away too.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
>It's a damn stupid law if it is
:-)
High weeds dry out and create a fire hazard. They also create a habitat for pests. Also allowing invasive plants to reach maturity, causes a nuisance to others. Dismiss it as a stupid law if you want. Calling it names won't get it changed
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The summary is wrong about CSS. It is playback protection, not copy protection. Copies of DVDs can be made by dozens of tools without ever decrypting anything. DVDs are a standard format.
DeCSS is about playback.
So this is a 180-degree turn from the earlier court decisions. What are the next steps?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Every day another law is passed,
News of evil terrorists in the shadows,
More FBI powers,
More RIAA penises getting harder,
More Microsoft corruption,
More "You gotta have Microsoft anus plugger version one point oh to run this mafia proprietary content",
Massive jailings of non-violent drug offenders to be violently sodomized and beaten,
Rising gas prices and oil execs mastubating over their profits,
Bloated corporations reducing quality of service while increasing profits,
More drones launched into the air to scout for flowering weeds,
More DEA telling you to keep an eye out for marijuana (wouldn't want medicine to counter the corrupt big Pharma) when hiking,
It is all BULLSHIT. It never ends!
The cattle people just take it -- take it -- take it!
Is there an end to this madness in sight, will people ever come together? With the world growing ever worse, shouldn't marijuana be legal AND mandatory as Bill Hicks suggested?
Someone needs to cross Kudzu with Marijuana so we'll all be stoned and wake up from the haze of this toilet world.
Why does the majority continue to take it up the ass? Why do we remain divided?
If you leave the door to your house open and go away on holiday, is it then legal for anybody to enter and take your things away? I don't think so - the presence of any copyright protection, even if it is just the words "Don't make a copy", means that you are not meant to do it, of course.
The only real question is whether there should be any such thing as copyright and what form it should have. I don't believe the CSS was ever meant to be a real encryption as much as a device that makes it clear that there was an intent to do something illegal. Take the analogy with the house again: if the door is open, you can explain away your presence in the house - you went in to see if everything was OK, or whatever; but if there is a lock, even the flimsiest kind, you will have to break in, and it will be clear that you didn't come in just by accident, "because you thought they were home".
No, I didn't mean that. I just meant it's unethical and causes a loss of profit.
If "spreading" a program that breaks CSS is illegal, than people in finland who use Bittorrent to download a linux distro will be breaking the law. Seriously, this is all messed up. It's "picket fence" security. A fence only twenty centimeters high can be stepped over, but the government makes it illegal. In which case, why bother with CSS anyway.
Surely what it really comes down to, however, is whether they actually had a right to put the lock there in the first place, or a right to order you not to break it. If you put a lock on someone else's house, should you expect the owner not to break it off? If you put a padlock on your house and sell the house to someone, can you sell it while withholding the right for them to enter it?
To put it in context, if I legally buy a DVD with a movie and legally license the content, why should the media cartels be able to tell me that I'm not allowed to play it on my Linux box using software designed to decrypt their CSS algorithm? Copyright is irrelevant (or should be) in this case because I've already licensed the content. Whether I play it using an "approved" player or kaffeine with libdvdcss on debian makes no difference to them, but there's a major convenience difference for me. Currently I live in Region 4 and have a nice collection of Region 4 DVDs. If I move to Regions 1 or 2 and lose my existing player along the way, I'll effectively have to re-license the media and pay for it all over again, just because the stupid publishers have been pushing through totalitarian laws that give them so much more control, all in the name of some kind of War Against Copyright Infringement which arguably doesn't even work.
What's specifically preventing me is a stupid law, being increasingly duplicated around the world (thanks partly to USA diplomacy and "Free Trade Agreement" conditions) that says I'm not allowed to use certain software to do it, even though I don't have much of an alternative, because it might also be able to be used to copy the content illegally.... and more specifically because I didn't reverse engineer their encryption and write that software myself. The specific software isn't illegal, the playback isn't illegal, but for some ludicrous reason the distribution of that software is illegal in some places.
This is why the DMCA and its copycat laws around the world are ridiculous, because they take a broadsword and inaccurate approach towards preventing illegal reproduction, putting far too much power in the hands of media publishers who have only their own interests in mind (including the ability to effectively define their own copyright laws and terms), and removing a whole swathe of things that people could otherwise do which had nothing to do with copyright infringement. Of course CSS is an "indication" that they don't want you to copy it. What's at stake is whether they should be allowed to indicate something like that and have it worth anything whatsoever in the eyes of the law.
A media publisher shouldn't be allowed to decide whether their content can be legally copied or not, because they'll typically abuse that privilege, deny fair use / fair dealing, and prevent whatever other traditional exceptions to copyright have always been inconvenient for them. Some content is in the public domain and there are other reasons and circumstances why it's legal to copy certain things, which publishers would love to deny people but legally can't, yet now they can flag their media so that it's effectively illegal to play or copy the media anyway. 50 or 100 years from now, depending on the location, all that content may be out of copyright. Will the technology to copy it still be illegal?
Uh-huh, I'm getting a bit ashamed of being a Finn these days. Having traveled around quite a bit, without breaking this ridiculous law we have here, I wouldn't have been able to access legally obtained content (at least when back home, hopefully this doesn't extend to Finns attempting to watch movies abroad ;). Wake up Hollywood, not all of us plan on staying put for the rest of our lives to consume your precious content where and how YOU decide we should do so.
Certainly makes me think twice before putting more money into obtaining broken goods and supporting interests of a few over-zealous copyright lobbyists.
(on related news: Finnish Pirate Party had its founding meeting this week, so perhaps there's hope for the madness to end some day...)
That's genius. Don't just scold browser vendors for breaking CSS, make it illegal! How many years of Finnish pound-me-in-the-ass prison for breaking ACID4?
Most people think DRM is a bit much for entertainment. Scrambled movies? Taking away people's life savings and houses over pop music? It's all nuts but it's big business to a handfull of companies and their owners.
The same logic can and is being applied to other publications on the web. Imagine newspapers and magazines published with DRM for subscribers. BBC has started down that path as did the Society of Automotive Engineers. MIT told SAE where to stick their DRM and SAE backed down but others will try. The future of publication is far from decided.
It's about money and control. M$ loves it because clients will only work on non free platforms, so competition can be locked out forever. This is what Vista's extensive DRM and Silverlight are all about and why Mono will never really work. Big publishers want pay per play and control of information. Of the two, they think control is more valuable because it channels people away from competitors. They can't eliminate alternate sources of news and entertainment without help from companies like M$, but M$ is only too eager to help.
We are really at a critical point. Society can reject digital restrictions now. The failure of Vista is a good sign but the increased popularity of Apple is a bad one. No one should have the kind of media control non free software creates. Hardware vendor's embrace of free software encouraging because it shows they don't want to be dominated by software makers. Business is starting to realize that DRM will concentrate power too effectively for their own good. People hate it because they hate pay per play and restricted media.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
CSS is NOT copy protection!
... .
CSS is NOT copy protection!
CSS is NOT copy protection!
CSS is NOT copy protection!
CSS is NOT copy protection!
How many times do we f'ing have to say it? It is not copy protection. It does not in any way prevent or even place the slightest barrier in the way of copying. You can make a copy of a CSS'd disc and it will be perfect and indistinguishable from any other, and will work exactly as well, and the CSS is not a mechanism that could ever make any difference to that, because
CSS is NOT copy protection!
CSS is NOT copy protection!
CSS is NOT copy protection!
CSS is NOT copy protection!
[repeat ad nauseam, or until the gestapo come to haul you off to gitmo]
That's merely a technicality. The vast majority of people are neither able or willing to discover and exploit the weaknesses in CSS for themselves, so making it illegal to distribute the known antidote(s) has the same effect as making it illegal to "break" CSS in the first place.
What good does it do you to be permitted to break the copy protection for private use if no one can legally tell you how to do it?
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Is it now? A two-line translation, while accurate in itself, is so uninformative as to be useless. I don't care what some blogger thinks. I want to make up my own mind. If the blogger were being helpful, he would've translated enough that we could usefully agree or disagree with him. Instead, we get to see his (poorly constructed) rhetoric splashed on the page and all we can do is roll our eyes and click to the next Slashdot news item.
I mean honestly..