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CSS of DVDs Ruled 'Ineffective' by Finnish Courts

Posted by Zonk on Fri May 25, 2007 02:26 PM
from the rip-away-my-pretties-rip-away dept.
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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.'"
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CSS of DVDs Ruled 'Ineffective' by Finnish Courts 25 Comments More /

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  • Catch-22? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Friday May 25 2007, @02:29PM (#19273593) Homepage Journal

    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.

    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.

    Does that seem a bit wrong to anyone else?

    • Re:Catch-22? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lixee (863589) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:37PM (#19273729)
      That might have been true in the past. In the age of the Internet, cracks can almost instantly become widespread.

    • Re:Catch-22? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TripMaster Monkey (862126) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:38PM (#19273761)
      On the other side of the coin, does this mean that all that is required to make it legal to crack a protection scheme is to crack it and make the crack widely available?

    • Re:Catch-22? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nsayer (86181) * <nsayer@kfu . c om> on Friday May 25 2007, @03:00PM (#19274117) Homepage
      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.
  • 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.

  • Obligatory Monty Python reference (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mr Pippin (659094) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:30PM (#19273605)
    ...and there was much rejoicing!

  • All Over Europe? (Score:5, Informative)

    by GuldKalle (1065310) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:32PM (#19273653)

    The conclusions of the court can be applied all over Europe since the word effective comes directly from the directive.

    Correct me if i'm wrong, but afaik the meaning of directive is that each member-country has to make their own law, based on these directives. So they must make their own interpretations if the directive, and therefore court rulings cannot make a direct precedence across borders.

    • Re:All Over Europe? (Score:5, Informative)

      by David Off (101038) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:35PM (#19273711) Homepage
      I think you are right. In addition, in France at least a district court ruling would not constitute jurisprudence. Only a ruling by the Conseil d'Etat (supreme or high court) would do. The ruling could possibly be used in arguments though.

  • CSS? (Score:4, Funny)

    by u-bend (1095729) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:35PM (#19273701) Homepage Journal
    Duh, what do cascading style sheets have to do with DVDs? They must have embedded web content. That must be it.

    Stop! I'm kidding. Put the flamethrowers away!

  • Nice... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kjella (173770) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:40PM (#19273807) Homepage
    ...but just a note on law. Even though EU passes directives, each country must pass their own laws in parliament. The EU does not make "federal law" like in the US. They may also apply different exceptions and such. So the law is not the same and even if it were, precedents do not legally apply. However, this goes straight to the core of the directive so if other countries read "effective" the same way... The precedent sounds rather strange to me though, it's like saying "if enough people are breaking the law, the law doesn't apply". Somehow I think they meant "to the effect of" meaning "however they do it, as long as it protects a copyrighted work". Not that it matters since the actual law is probably in Finnish anyway.

    • Re:Nice... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TeknoHog (164938) on Friday May 25 2007, @03:01PM (#19274121) Homepage Journal

      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.

  • "effective" means "used by copyrightholder" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Husgaard (858362) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:49PM (#19273959)

    There is a problem with this ruling, as it only takes local law into account, and not the directive. According to the EU "solidarity principle", the interpretation of local laws made because of EU directives should be in line with the directive.

    And the InfoSoc directive [eu.int] actually defines "effective technological measures" in article 6.3.

    The definition is contrary to common sense. Basically the directive defines "effective technological measures" as "technological measures" used by copyright holders:

    3. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression 'technological measures' means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other subjectmatter, which are not authorised by the rightholder of any copyright or any right related to copyright as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC. 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.

    You can only get such perverted definitions if you let the copyright holders write the law! I'm glad that Finland will not take part in such a perversion.

    • 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.

  • Well, then (Score:5, Funny)

    by bccomm (709680) <mano155NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday May 25 2007, @03:17PM (#19274325) Journal
    CSS is Finnished then.

    • Re:But... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gerrysteele (927030) on Friday May 25 2007, @02:40PM (#19273795)
      Well your logic is askew... There are specific laws that deal with the use case of a stop sign denoting exactly what to do. There are no specific laws relating to the use of CSS on DVDs.

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nsayer (86181) * <nsayer@kfu . c om> on Friday May 25 2007, @03:04PM (#19274169) Homepage
      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... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kamots (321174) on Friday May 25 2007, @03:06PM (#19274197)
      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.

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