German Court: Open Source Project Liable For 3rd Party DRM-Busting Coding

Diamonddavej writes "TorrentFreak reports a potentially troubling court decision in Germany. The company Appwork has been threatened with a 250,000 Euro fine for functionality committed to its open-source downloader (JDownloader2) repository by a volunteer coder without Appwork's knowledge. The infringing code enables downloading of RTMPE video streams (an encrypted streaming video format developed by Adobe). Since the code decrypted the video streams, the Hamburg Regional Court decided it represented circumvention of an 'effective technological measure' under Section 95a of Germany's Copyright Act and it threatened Appwork with a fine for 'production, distribution and possession' of an 'illegal' piece of software."

Comments

"effective technological measure"

[mwvdlee]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Doesn't the concept of "effective" mean that code breaking the DRM cannot exist?

Re:"effective technological measure"

[Kjella]

A book written in Greek and a book written in English using a cipher are both gibberish to me, but understanding one depends on a parser and the other on a decryption key. In short the understanding of "effective technological measure" seem to be that the protocol is trying to use a secret (CSS key, AACS key, HDMI key etc.) to protect the content. So if you took any file format and wrapped it in AES with a static key with no memory protection whatsoever then decrypting it in any other program would be a DMCA violation, geeks all get caught up in "effective" but in context it just means a measure intended to have that effect specifically to exclude all other attempts at interpreting a protocol as "cracking" it.

Re:"effective technological measure"

[Kat M.]

Section 95a (2) of the German copyright law defines specifically what an effective technological measure is. It specifically includes "encryption, scrambling or other transformation". It does not require that the encryption etc. need to be unbreakable, just as a physical lock does not have to pose an unsurmountable barrier in order to make breaking it illegal.

contributions to open source products should be

[Chrisq]

contributions to open source products should be just like posts to websites. If someone posts something illegal then the authorities should issue a "take down" notice to the project. If they remove it then only the original poster should be liable.

The owner/admin is (broadly) responsble...

[Stolpskott]

In the world of athletics, the athlete is responsible for verifying beforehand that any substances entering their body are free from performance-enhancing drugs and a range of other substances. In this case, that same rule seems to have been applied to software - the admins are responsible for code entering the body of the application.
Aside form anything else, my opinion is that someone on the project should have oversight of new code submissions before they are committed to the main codebase. If that is not happening here, then this is a lesson in stupidity for the admins. If it is happening, then the admins really are facilitating, because they have explicitly allowed that functionality into the application. Flipping the coin again, if the admins explicitly allowed the content without realizing what it does, then they have commited code without understanding the purpose or impact of the code, and we are back to the lesson in stupidity again...

unreviewed code

[feds]

Actually this is worrisome for the open source community not because they ended up in court but because Appwork accepted code without reviewing it and actually without even knowing what it does. How can they assure users that installing the application they don't become part of a 15 million users botnet?