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.

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!"

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#

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.

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.

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)