Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
I tried to reply but apparently /. comment engine is even worse than Diggs.
The headline is WRONG - it's NOT illegal to break the CSS content protection for PERSONAL use - it's completely legal. Period.
This ruling is not about viewing the movies on Linux or any other device but spreading the DeCSS program itself.
So bottom line:
Decryption of movies to view them on Linux was not and is not even after this ruling illegal.
Unfortunately Slashdot fails and posts every piece of FUD they can get their hands on without any verification.
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.
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
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.
This space up for sale.
Sigh. No, it is not stealing, it is copyright infringement.
Both illegal, but they are different laws.
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
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...