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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."
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!"
I have wondered a few times, what if you built your own encryption/decryption software/hardware, then decoded a DVD, further, encoded it in your encryption scheme and shared this with a small group of friends who also have the same hardware/software.
Would you be compelled to allow the **AA et al to have your keys and view what you have on DVD, or would that be against the law for them to do? What works for them should surely work for the private individual regarding encryption. Yes it's not exactly a workable answer, but the question remains valid IMO. To know that you have a copy of a movie on the DVD they would have to crack your encryption. This means that unless they actually caught you physically making the copy, they would have zero evidence. Cracking your encryption in the US would be illegal. I'm not sure about elsewhere.
Am I missing something?
Using your own encryption ensures private use only, and may not be all that useful, but I'm interested in what the law would do.
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I seem to recall the very people who passed Lex Karpela saying that they don't know what it actually forbids and allows. Given this, I think the only thing it actually intends is to help are the profits of Karpela's then-boyfriend, movie director Olli Saarela.
Oh well, just the usual corruption associated with politics, coupled with the also-usual outright lies and attempts to suppress the understandably critical reaction from the citizens by blaming it on "outside forces". Finnish politicians at their finest indeed...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Anyone know of any encrypted movies being traded on P2P networks?
What's the difference between encrypting and encoding? Is passwordless encryption anything more than a mere encoding of the data?!
What many people insist on calling "codes" are actually ciphers anyway. The difference is that actual codes are linguistic whereas ciphers are mathematical. Anything which uses a machine has to be some sort of cipher...
Let's just call ASCII a way to cipher text!
It would be more accurate to have this mean "American Standard Cipher for Information Interchange" since it's a simple subsitution cipher. As is EBCIDIC, unicode, baudot, even morse "code".
So they have basically concluded that it is legal to do something, but to help someone else do this legal thing, is illegal.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
What I wanted to get to was:
In case brute force decryption attacks, which do not disrupt external systems, are illegal:So in case a genius breaks the CSS encryption in his head by just reading a binary DVD data stream from a computer monitor, he had commited an illegal act.
I guess my argument is heading into the fuzzy domain of thought crimes...
Living in China, I get DVDs for next to nothing (USD0.5). They're usually crap quality[1], but they do the job most of the time.
If the purpose of region codes were to allow a 'title' to be sold here at a lower price than in the US (say), then surely we'd see them for sale; but we don't. Such a policy requires that every title be sold in every market, at least the identical DVD as other places, but preferably, with region specific subtitles/audio.
[1] They are crap quality usually deliberately since they try to cram a long movie onto a low-capacity disk or more than one movie onto a high capacity disk. Many DVD players have trouble playing both these (we have two). There are also DVDs which are just crap because eg a hand-held camera in a cinema.
Max.
I don't know Finnish law and haven't read the court's decision (how's that for a disclaimer prior to spouting off?), but I wouldn't just assume that buying a DVD and using a licensed player, is enough to make it legal. It may be that all CSS-scrambled DVDs are now illegal to watch in Finland, regardless of the player device.
Even in USA, it's pretty murky. The issue just hasn't come up, because it hasn't been tested in court. DMCA says you're not allowed to watch a CSS-scrambled DVD "without authorization" but I have never seen a DVD that comes with any sort of notice that explains under which conditions the owner of a DVD is allowed to watch it. We all just ass/u/me that watching it on a DVDCCA-licensed player, is one of the allowed conditions. The MPAA companies have no incentive to sue anyone for watching their DVDs on DVDCCA-licensed players. But that doesn't mean it's legal. We don't know. Nobody except the copyright holders do. It might be that you're only authorized to push a play button that descrambles the DVD, if you are wearing blue socks at the time.
If the Finns copied US' DMCA, they could have the same vagueness.
The way to force-test the issue in USA, would be for someone "friendly" (not a MPAA member) to publish a CSS-scrambled DVD, and then start suing people. (Sue someone who bought your DVD, for bypassing the CSS without authorization, and also sue Sony for selling circumvention devices.) You can even put a notice on the case the DVD comes in: "you are not authorized to bypass this disk's CSS under any circumstances." (Most people would still buy the DVD, not even knowing what that means, just as they supposedly agree to multiple pages of EULA legalese prior to spending their money.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.