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."

Comments

criticized

[Fri13]

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.

Re:criticized

[Wookieblaster]

In other words it more legal to download a movie illegally than watching it from a DVD (also illegal). Oh my.http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/26/1357257#

Re:criticized

[Anonymous Coward]

On Finland, it is now a criminal act to play/copy DVD by using libdvdcss In Finland, we are not going to give a shit about these laws. Not now, seemingly not before, and most importantly not in the future.

Re:criticized

[Darkness404]

Wow.... So now, not only using "piracy" do you get A) Free content B) No DRM C) Faster content (if what you are downloading hasn't been localized for where you live) but now it is more legal then buying a DVD and watching it?!?! And people wonder why "piracy" has grown.

Re:Linux DVD playback

[livingdeadline]

Well, since cracking CSS is criminal according to the court it seems pretty clear that it's illegal

Copy Protection?

[Sparr0]

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.

Re:Copy Protection?

[mdmkolbe]

CSS prevents copying a DVD to a video tape or other format. But it does nothing to prevent duplicating (i.e. copying) the DVD using another DVD because doing that doesn't require cracking CSS.

In the days before DVD burner's were common, CSS may have been effective copy protection, but now days it just keeps people from playing it in the wrong country. Country codes mean that it is and was at least in part intended to be playback protection.

Re:Copy Protection?

[Anonymous Coward]

For many of the anti-IP zealots on Slashdot (I don't know if you are one of them), the first step to understanding the situation would be to realise that the judges, economists, lawyers and so on who work on these matters are not simply tools of some industrial conspiracy. There is a solid basis in economic theory for intellectual property, just as there is for physical property, and this is one of the reasons why there are laws protecting IP (another is the notion of moral rights to one's creative works, which has a strong tradition especially in French law).

I think you can find many economists who would argue that current copyright laws (distinct from patents) give too much economic protection to producers of creative works, and for too long a time. I haven't myself yet read enough of the literature to make up my mind on whether copyright should be reduced in length or scope, but the idea of abolishing it (or intellectual property generally), as many Slashdot zealots favour, is generally viewed as an extreme and nonsensical position.

The central problem with copyright at the moment is, I would say, a technical one, ie how to protect IP and still take advantage of technological developments that make it easier to duplicate and transmit creative works etc. The fact that it is often easier to download works illegally than legally (never mind the cost) is a major problem that must be addressed before there can be any hope of curtailing rampant copyright violation. Official toleration of violation of IP laws in many countries (eg China, where widespread violation of IP laws is a major factor in producing enormous trade surpluses with the EU and USA) is another.

Re:Copy Protection?

[Pig Hogger]

One day businesses will learn that forced price discrepancies like that kill your business long term.

One day, geeks will learn that businesses are run by business types who don't give a flying fuck about the long-term but want their profit **NOW**.

So the quality of security matters not, then?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Madness

[growse]

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.

So it's illegal? What does that mean?

[fishbowl]

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?

Re:Human made translation of Turre Legal's blog en

[sudog]

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 was all about region coding, not copying.

[argent]

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.

Re:Linux DVD playback

[betterunixthanunix]

More likely, "You are breaking the law by watching those DVDs using royalty free software, so we will seize your computer and fine you more than you can afford to make an example of you. Oh yeah, and we are bowing to American business interests in the process."

Re:Linux DVD playback

[jlarocco]

There will be no servers hosting DeCSS in Finland.

Other than that, there won't be any change. I've been watching DVDs under Linux in the United States for years and have never had a problem.

Unless you call up your local copyright police, report you're "illegally" watching a DVD, and then let them watch you play it on an "unapproved" player, there's no way for them to prove you've broken the law. Short of that, if it ever comes up, point to your regular DVD player and claim you've only used it to watch movies. Burden of proof is on them.