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Finnish Appeals Court Rules Breaking CSS Illegal

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-thank-god-nobody-knows-how-to-do-that dept.

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."

7 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. criticized by Fri13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:criticized by Wookieblaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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#

  2. Copy Protection? by Sparr0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Copy Protection? by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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**.
  3. CSS was all about region coding, not copying. by argent · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Linux DVD playback by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  5. Re:Linux DVD playback by jlarocco · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Maybe not