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

Oh, that CSS

[langelgjm]

For a moment there, I shook my head at the idea of the courts getting involved in webpage layout.

Re:Oh, that CSS

[PinkyDead]

...for a moment there, my heart leapt at the possibility of Bill Gates getting sent to jail for crimes against conformity.

Re:Oh, that CSS

[switchfutguy]

i knew some people were intense about WC3 validation, but this is a bit much

Better URL

[Anonymous Coward]

A better URL to a non-robo-translated english version is http://www.turre.com/blog/?p=156

Human made translation of Turre Legal's blog entry

[livingdeadline]

There's now a proper, human made translation of Turre legal's blog entry available

Linux DVD playback

[Nomaxxx]

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!"

Re:Linux DVD playback

[livingdeadline]

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

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.

Re:Linux DVD playback

[egork]

In other news in Germany a prosecutor has refused to start criminal investigations against private filesharers, as he sees an abuse in the way lawyers use this process to find out the identity of those sharers. The lawyers then would drop the criminal charges and start a civil case where they can earn money. In a criminal case there is not much they can earn. The said prosecutor was himself in turn sued for refusing the cooperation.

How long until the futility and the craziness of chasing and criminalizing of the software will be realized on a world scale.

What can people do? The best would be a flashmob where everybody using Linux in USA would just call the "copyright police" and denounce themselves in one go. So that police realize, what a nonsense it is to run after the millions of better educated citizens for such petty crimes!

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

[weicco]

You missed a little, but crucial point. You must download non-encrypted version of the movie from P2P network. If you download encrypted one, you are still breaking the law if you are watching it without properly licensed player. And you must download it by using a client which doesn't share the same file you are downloading.

This law, Lex Karpela as some might call it, is really confusing but luckily I don't have to deal with it. I do live in Finland but I own a standalone DVD player and buy all my DVDs :)

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.

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?

[Kjella]

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. The CSS key is written to sector 0, and if I remember correctly regular DVD recorders can't write to sector 0 and regular platters have sector 0 filled with zeros. So no, you could not make a 1:1 copy using a regular DVD burner. I honestly don't remember or care, it might be illegal but it's been about two lines of commands to get it in any recent Linux box.

Re:Copy Protection?

[Anonymous Cowpat]

well, sort of.

The idea of region encoding is so that they can set different price points (and release dates) for different parts of the world.

They can sell a DVD in region 6 (China) for the equivalent of $2 (say) because that is the maximum price that the market will bear. The region encoding stops someone from buying up 10,000 DVDs at $2 and then importing them to the US and selling them for $10. Making $8 profit whilst still significantly undercutting the discs that the studios want to sell in the US.

It also means that they can stagger the release of a movie around the world, and then stagger the DVD release whilst keeping people from getting DVDs from one of the earlier regions into one of the other regions whilst the movie is still in the theatres there (thus creating extra ticket sales from the people who just have to see the movie more than once and can not get it on a DVD yet)

Re:Copy Protection?

[ultranova]

The only reason they have added this crap is to stop copying anyway, it's obvious that it isn't intended to stop actual playback for 'legal' uses.

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...

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**.

Headline incorrect - CSS breaking is still legal.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:So the quality of security matters not, then?

[Aetuneo]

This post in encrypted with rot-26. If you are able to read this text, you have violated the law by circumventing the encryption.

Sorry, it had to be said.

Re:How?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

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.

One appeal left

[Aggrajag]

The defendant can still appeal to the Finnish equivalent of Supreme Court.

Re:Live by the golden rule

[TheP4st]

Wow... With your flawless logic and profound argumentation you have succeeded in turning me into a RIAA supporter for life.