German Court: Open Source Project Liable For 3rd Party DRM-Busting Coding 178
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."
"effective technological measure" (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
contributions to open source products should be (Score:5, Insightful)
Not 3rd party code (Score:2, Insightful)
It stopped being 3rd party code the moment Appwork accepted the contribution and started spreading the code itself. That is the moment they became liable. If they do not like that, they should not spread "just anybody's code" without verification.
We may not like it, it makes the life of open source projects more difficult, but that is the way it works. For good reasons.
The owner/admin is (broadly) responsble... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Does the copyright need an owner? (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy, public key cryptography. Instead of using "anonymous coward" as the pseudonym, use "anonymous coward who posses the private key to the following public key.
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCqGKukO1De7zhZj6+H0qtjTkVxwTCpvKe4eCZ0
FPqri0cb2JZfXJ/DgYSF6vUpwmJG8wVQZKjeGcjDOL5UlsuusFncCzWBQ7RKNUSesmQRMSGkVb1/
3j+skZ6UtW+5u09lHNsj6tQ51s1SPrCBkedbNf0Tp0GbMJDyR4e9T04ZZwIDAQAB
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----"
Oh who am I kidding, we're talking about law makers who criminalized a piece of software. "public key cryptography" probably sounds like "thermonuclear weapons" to them.
unreviewed code (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"effective technological measure" (Score:5, Insightful)
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" (Score:2, Insightful)
Meanwhile in the crypto world, if someone breaks a cipher, the creator will admit defeat like an honorable man, he won't go cry to a judge like a baby.
Re:unreviewed code (Score:2, Insightful)
Did they actually accept the code? Is it a fork? We don't seem to know and I suspect that this was more along the lines of code being submitted, not yet reviewed by core contributors, etc. But because it was public... the court decided to convict. The code probably would not have ever gotten into a binary or official / stable release of the code.
Re:Hamburg regional court (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"effective technological measure" (Score:4, Insightful)
Section 95a (2) [gesetze-im-internet.de] 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.
Re:"effective technological measure" (Score:3, Insightful)