CSS of DVDs Ruled 'Ineffective' by Finnish Courts

An anonymous reader writes "The CSS protection used in DVDs has been ruled "ineffective" by Helsinki District Court. This means that CSS is not covered by the Finnish copyright law amendment of 2005 (based on EU Copyright Directive from 2001), allowing it to be freely circumvented. Quoting the press release: ' The conclusions of the court can be applied all over Europe since the word effective comes directly from the directive ... A protection measure is no longer effective, when there is widely available end-user software implementing a circumvention method. My understanding is that this is not technology-dependent. The decision can therefore be applied to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as well in the future.'"

I think extending this to BR and HD is a stretch.

[Overzeetop]

It's an interesting concept though - if you can crack the system, and the cracks are easily obtainable in enduser products, then it is - for the purposes of the courts - not really encrypted. I like that thinking.

Re:Catch-22?

[lixee]

That might have been true in the past. In the age of the Internet, cracks can almost instantly become widespread.

So which politician...

[lilomar]

...do we have to bri^H^H^Hlobby to get some key sections from this "European Copyright Directive" tacked onto the end of the DMCA?

And how did the Europeans get all the good lawmakers anyway? I'm thinking about moving to Finland where copyright seems to make more sense.

Re:Catch-22?

[LordNimon]

The alternative would be for the courts to examine the protection method and decide (without any empirical evidence) whether the method is effective. That will never work. Frankly, I think the court's ruling is a huge victory for us - because it means that crappy security systems will eventually lose any protection under copyright law.

Re:Catch-22?

[nsayer]

While it seems odd, the global Internet makes it a reasonable possibility.

If a crack is available openly in places where it is legal, and you can get to those cracks from within a country where it is illegal, then I could still come to the conclusion that the protection is ineffecetive simply because anyone who wanted to circumvent it would trivially be able to, even if no laws in that country had yet been broken.

Re:Nice...

[TeknoHog]

The precedent sounds rather strange to me though, it's like saying "if enough people are breaking the law, the law doesn't apply".

Nothing strange there IMHO, considering the following:

1. This is how advocates of nonprofit 'piracy' have often argued. The law should represent common morality, so whatever a significant portion of people do should not be illegal.
2. This ruling is similar to saying that you can legally break ROT13 and press Shift while loading a CD. It's saying that if CSS is so easy to break then it doesn't deserve any legal protection. Much like insurance companies that have standards for bike locks.

Re:"effective" means "used by copyrightholder"

[lilomar]

Technological measures shall be deemed 'effective' where the use of a protected work or other subjectmatter is controlled by the rightholders through application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective.

(Emphasis mine)

The nice Judges in the Helsinki District Court have decided that, with the wide-spread use of DeCSS, CSS no longer achieves it's objective. So rather than make criminals out of all the Linux users in Finland (- those who don't watch DVDs on their computers) they have rightly stated that DeCSS isn't an effective encryption mechanism, and thus, it isn't any more illegal to bypass the CSS than it would be if the DVD in question were unencrypted.

Mod parent funny

[elrous0]

Wish I had some mod points. That's the funniest goatse post I've seen since it became tired (which was about 5 minutes after it was first posted).

Re:But...

[nsayer]

Decrypting DVDs and violating copyrights are not the same thing. There are plenty of reasons I have for decrypting CSS without the DVD-CCA's approval which do not violate copyright law in any way.

Your linkage of unauthorized decryption with violating copyright law is exactly what the "mafiaa" would like for you to believe. You've fallen into their trap. You have lost. Have a nice day.

Re:But...

[Kamots]

There's a very distinct (and important!) difference between bypassing enforcement technology and violating copyright.

Copyright law spells out how to tell if a use of copyrighted works is infringing or not, and provides a list of examples of non-infringing use.

However, enforcement technology may well prevent you from doing any sort of copying; even what is explicitly provided as an example of allowable use! Bypassing the enforcement technology for this purpose is clearly not a violation of the owners copyright.

So, circumventing the enforcement tech, and violating copyright are two seperate things.

Now, to continue on a slightly different topic... Why should circumvention be illegal in the first place? Copyright law already handles every case where someone who is circumventing the enforcement is doing something you'd classify as wrong. It seems to add redundancy, and more importantly, target a new class of people... namely those who are trying to excersize thier fair-use rights.

I'll leave it up to you to speculate who could want such legislation and why they'd want it. I'm pretty sure you can figure out my thoughts on it, I'll leave you to develop your own.

Re:But...

[Kadin2048]

Why should circumvention be illegal in the first place?

Because the satellite TV companies, and more recently the movie industry, bought up a lot of Senators and Representatives and got some legislation passed?

Re:Catch-22?

[Stocktonian]

Not everyone is subject to the same law stopping reverse engineering. All that is needed is for someone to crack the encryption somewhere it is legal then distribute it so that it is widespread. Then everyone in Europe at least can use it.

I'm sure there's something missing here and I doubt any of that would really work but we can dream can't we.

Re:But...

[Kamots]

I didn't say why *is* it illegal, I asked why *should* it be illegal... :P

The answer you gave is to why it is.

Re:Cheesy analogy

[TeknoHog]

Now don't get me wrong, I hate DRM in all forms, but isn't this just like saying if I lock my door with a lock that is easily pickable, then it's ok for someone to break in?

This is probably true if you think about insurance business. Likewise, trademark law requires the owner to actively defend the trademark.

Of course, the main problem with these analogies is that basic copyright still applies; you can break CSS in order to watch the movie on Linux, but you're not allowed to distribute tons of copies.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the enforcement technology is ineffective, does that make violating the copyright OK?

It doesn't make it legal to violate the copyright. It does make it legal to, say, publish a paper on how weak CSS is. It makes it legal to write your own DVD player software. If the emperor has no clothes, the law is an ass if it's illegal to say so.

Re:Catch-22?

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case you know how to circumvent the copy protection -> the method becomes obvious.

You really cannot be told not to do modifications to your electronic apparel / software. No matter what the vendors try to make you believe. You are not breaking the law in any sense so you can tell your friends how to circumvent the protection too.

You are not eating anyone's bread by telling people how to circumvent copy-protections on media they already own!

If you think that is illegal, well hey, the corporations have been very effective at their lobbying. Photocopying and selling books & warez movies is another thing entirely.

Re:Catch-22?

[Cajun Hell]

What this would seem to say to me is that in order to get to the point at which the protection measure is considered to be ineffective, you have to go through a point at which it is not widely available, and you're breaking the law.

Unless you can develop and distribute the countermeasure in a time (e.g. prior to the passing of the DMCA-like law) or place (e.g. Antarctica) where it isn't breaking the law.

Finland prohibits people, while standing on Finnish soil, from opening bottles containing genies. They don't prohibit a flock of unbottled genies from flying into Finland from the outside.

Re:Catch-22?

[aichpvee]

How many protection measures have to be ruled ineffective before they declare the law ineffective?

Re:Catch-22?

[malsdavis]

"Does that seem a bit wrong to anyone else?"

No, in the same way watching a DVD disc that someone shoplifted is not the same as actually shoplifting the DVD in the first place.

The judgement seems to be along the lines of "the crack is so widely available, that it's not really even definable as an encryption system anymore". It's like if you leave your front door key under the mat (or in some other insanely obvious place) and then a buglar uses it to open the front door to your house and burgle it. Your insurance company won't normally pay out because effectively, you didn't really lock your door at all.

Wrong analogy - your house, THEIR key

[dwheeler]

No. DRM says that when you leave your house, someone ELSE controls the key and locks your door, and decides under what conditions you're allowed to have your key back to enter your own house. This ruling just says that if the key to your house is widely available on the Internet, you're allowed to use that widely-available key to enter your own house.

Re:I think extending this to BR and HD is a stretc

[mr_matticus]

You misunderstand. "Fair use" is an exception to copyright protection. It is not a means of defense against copyright infringement, which would necessarily involve the commission of copyright infringement--fair use is *noninfringing* use and therefore the two are mutually exclusive. If your act is fair use, it is not copyright infringement. People don't "generally understand what is meant" if you go by what people throw around on Slashdot. Fair use is not an excuse for committing an unlawful act. It is an exemption from the applicability of the act--it is a *possible* defense to *alleged* copyright infringement in a *limited* and *variable* number of circumstances.

There is no such thing as a prima facie defense to copyright infringement because there is no fixed definition of fair use, which you yourself point out in your own post. I also specified that format shifting is not CATEGORICALLY fair use. That does not preclude the determination of certain kinds of transfers to be covered by fair use.

Re:But...

[nsayer]

Wrongo. In 1974 [bc.edu] Congress revised copyright law to keep up with the nacent computer industry. To make a long story short, in order for the copying to count, the copy must be embodied in a "fixed" medium. That is, something non-volatile. RAM doesn't count.

And besides, there are fair use exceptions to copyright law that allow for copies to be made even if they ARE in a fixed medium. Backups are a big one. Yes, it is perfectly legal for you to copy a CD and let your kids use the copy while you keep the original locked in a drawer for safekeeping. The only thing about that same scenario that makes it illegal to do the same with a DVD is the DMCA.