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CSS of DVDs Ruled 'Ineffective' by Finnish Courts 222

Posted by Zonk from the rip-away-my-pretties-rip-away dept.
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 More

CSS of DVDs Ruled 'Ineffective' by Finnish Courts

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  • Catch-22? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:29PM (#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 @01:37PM (#19273729)
      That might have been true in the past. In the age of the Internet, cracks can almost instantly become widespread.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by BosstonesOwn ( 794949 )
      Not really , think civil disobedience.

      I took from it that if it's widely hacked and in use then it's deemed useless.

      Sort of like when everyone started decrypting dv... oh my bad.

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

      by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:38PM (#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?
      • Widely available doesn't just mean that anyone could download it though...it has to be available in the sense that almost any end user could apply the crack and use it effectively. Something like AnyDVD, where all the user needs to know is how to download a file and install it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )
        The catch is to make it simple enough for everyone to use it. Like include it in the VLC decoder set and distribute it. It's not just distributing code and expecting people to patch it. It's making it simple enough that the average Joe Sixpack can just get a download and doesn't have to jump through hoops to (in this case play) use their legally bought product.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LordNimon ( 85072 )
      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.
      • CSS was never protected under copyright law... it was protected under DMCA and any other relevant law, industrial secrets, patents and licensing. Same thing for AACS. What is copyrighted is the protected content, not the DRM.

        The ruling only means the court will not protect obsolete, weak or otherwise largely compromised DRM schemes. This is a good thing as it will prevent companies from seeking DMCA-like protection for daft/dummy/broken DRM schemes.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jZnat ( 793348 )
          Hey, the DMCA was a modification to Title 17 of the USC: copyright. The DMCA is a part of American copyright law.
          • The DMCA copyright amendment does not make DRM itself as a technological measure any more copyrightable. While DMCA in the USA is an extension of copyright law, things are different elsewhere. In any case, only the protected content is.

            Most current DRM schemes rely on common cryptographic algorithm and secret keys, nothing copyrightable and very little (if anything) patentable there. Uncover the root keys and you can blow all DRM wide-open because pretty much everything else is non-patentable/copyrightable

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by N8F8 ( 4562 )
      Sounds like a good way to keep the law in sync with the norms of society.

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

      by nsayer ( 86181 ) * <nsayer&kfu,com> on Friday May 25, 2007 @02:00PM (#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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Cajun Hell ( 725246 )

      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. The

    • Re:Catch-22? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by malsdavis ( 542216 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @04:32PM (#19276173)
      "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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by icsx ( 1107185 )
      You are missing the point. The CSS protection is _weak_ and it can be bypassed easily with a free prog from internet. The whole CSS is _said to be strong_ while it is not according to this court (and my personal opinion).

  • I think extending this to BR and HD is a stretch. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:29PM (#19273597) Journal
    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.
    • I do too. I wonder if we will ever see that in the good old US of Corporations... Damn there i go again being forward thinking like our , dvd decrypting european overlords, and I for one welcome them.

    • Re:I think extending this to BR and HD is a stretc (Score:4, Informative)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @02:30PM (#19274541) Journal
      I like this ruling a lot. I notice that the DMCA includes similar language.

      Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems

              `(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter.
      What are the chances of us getting a similar ruling in the US?
      • Unlikely.

        The common interpretation here as to what 'effective' means is that it is in fact an access control as opposed to some sort of thing that is not really an access control but which is put forward as such. To use an analogy, if you put the worst lock in the world on a gate (think of a combination lock where the combination is 3), it is effective; if you put a piece of paper on the gate that merely had the word 'lock' on it, trusting to people to respect it as if it were a lock, that would not be. Or

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hatta ( 162192 )
          For example, in the Streambox case, there was a one bit flag to indicate whether access was allowed. This was found to be an effective control.

          Isn't there a copy protect flag on CDDA tracks? By that precedent, it would constitute an effective access control, and so CD rippers are illegal.
          • Does anyone use it?

            Also n.b. that there are distinct offenses for circumventing an access control and circumventing a copy control; they aren't the same. An access control would not let you listen to the CD at all but would let you copy it, if that's possible. (CSS is an access control that doesn't prohibit copying; you can copy the encrypted data from the DVD without circumventing CSS) A copy control would let you listen to the CD but not copy it.
            • Actually, I should clarify this: the offense is trafficking in copy control circumvention devices. Actually circumventing it would simply be copying, and thus regular old copyright infringement (to which fair use is a defense). So ripping a CD with a no copy flag would not be any different from ripping any other CD; the presence of the flag doesn't make it worse. But if someone is making a tool that circumvents the no copy flag, then that is something for which you could get in trouble.
              • "Fair use" is not a defense to copyright infringement. If you have a fair use action, then you're not guilty of copyright infringement. The fact that you may be sued for copyright infringement when your action is indeed covered by fair use does not change anything--I can sue you right now for copyright infringement without you ever encountering anything I own the copyright to. Fair use is a *possible* defense to *alleged* copyright infringement *iff* (not a typo) it meets specific criteria, frequently em
                • Fair use is a defense to a prima facie case of copyright infringement. Also it is convenient to speak of fair use as a defense to infringement, since generally people understand what is meant.

                  As for what is a fair use and what isn't, anything can be a fair use, and anything can not be a fair use. It's entirely case by case, without any kind of use automatically fair or automatically unfair. In RIAA v. Diamond, IIRC, the district court found that it could be fair use to space shift, which consisted of a pers

                  • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                    by mr_matticus ( 928346 )
                    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 i
                    • "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.

                      Fair use is structured as a defense. The plaintiff can ignore fair use unless and until it is invoked by the defendant. Further, the burden is on the defendant to successfully argue fair use. This is appropriate, as he is the one who is claiming th
      • I can easily see this argument as a pretty strong argument in U.S. courts. Not even good lawyers can predict what U.S. courts will do in situations like this, but I'd expect judges to listen to that argument with a lot of sympathy. It makes a lot of sense: "if everyone knows how to break it, it ain't effective". IANAL, and what happens in Finland does NOT automatically get accepted in the U.S. But what Finland did is exactly what U.S. courts often have to do: when there's a term in the law that is unclea

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MooUK ( 905450 )
          The UK version of the applicable laws, at least, specifies that "effective" pretty much means "it exists", not "it works". I can't recall the exact wording and don't particularly want to wade through legalese to find it.

          This suggests to me that the Finnish precedent is one that would be impossible in the UK. I believe the DMCA has a similar definition.

      • What are the chances of us getting a similar ruling in the US?

        Let me suggest, absolutely zero. The problem is that that "effectively controls" is defined in the law and it does not mean what you would like it to mean (or indeed what any sensible person would expect it to mean).

        Here is the definition:

        (B) a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with th

        • The problem is that using DeCSS on a DVD is not going to be considered to be "in the ordinary course of its [the DVD's] operation".

          IMHO (IANAL):

          It might be if DeCSS software becomes widely enough used.

          It might also be in the case of platforms that can ONLY play DVDs by using a player based on DeCSS because the "legitimate licensees" have not seen fit to make anything "legit" available, or if the DeCSS based software becomes more common than the "legit" products.

          Oh, this COULD get interesting.

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

    by Mr Pippin ( 659094 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:30PM (#19273605)
    ...and there was much rejoicing!

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

    by GuldKalle ( 1065310 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:32PM (#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 @01:35PM (#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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well, in Finland they still have two more court levels to grind through, guess it'll take at least year each.

        Even though Finnish supreme civil court might come in the future to same conclusion, it's still local precedent applicable in Finland only. Granted, supreme court decisions are as applicable as laws, but it's still country-level judicial decision, not EU-wide. Wait and see.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by icsx ( 1107185 )
      The directive gives instructions how to implement it to the law of each country. There is some leverage but the main concept is to be kept the same. Each country dont have to agree 100% with the directive but they have to obey it from the most parts. Good example is that copyright law directive. Officially you cant copu a CD which has a copy protection, even for your own use and they implemented that 100% here so officially, if i own a copy protected CD, i cannot transfer its content legally to my iPod. Th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by starwed ( 735423 )
        No, they were passed into law by jackasses who didn't know the real meaning of them. I imagine the people who actually conceived the laws had a pretty clear idea.
    • I belive you are right. But there are at least two differing ways a court can arrive to their conclusion: 1) the law based on the EU directive is found to be sufficently clear (and correctly implementing the directive) which allows the local court to deliver a decision in the case or 2) there are some uncertainties surrounding the issue at hand which prompts the court to refer the issue (not the case itself) to the European Court of Justice. Reasons for such a referal might be unclear parts of a directive (

  • Of course you know this means: (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Freedom Pastry!

    You've crossed the line now, Denmark.

    - The Corporate States of America

  • Freedom! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Eat your Freedom Fries, lads! These Finns need Liberatin'!"

  • CSS? (Score:4, Funny)

    by u-bend ( 1095729 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:35PM (#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!
    • Actually, spyware is loaded via the @import command. Got to infect all those computers belonging to pirates. As for innocent bystanders, they're collateral damage in the war on pirates.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jZnat ( 793348 )
      Better question: what does this article have to with Counter-Strike: Source? :)

  • But... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by a-zarkon! ( 1030790 )
    If the enforcement technology is ineffective, does that make violating the copyright OK? Weak analogy: A stop sign in an intersection is easily circumvented, does that mean it's OK for me to blow right by them? No, I'm not on the side of the mafiaa - just not sure I agree with the logic here. I'd rather see some discussion of the copyright laws themselves rather than CSS technology to "enforce" them. My 2 cents.

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

      by gerrysteele ( 927030 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:40PM (#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,com> on Friday May 25, 2007 @02:04PM (#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: (Score:2)

        by raynet ( 51803 )
        The reason copyright can apply is that while you do something to the CSS you usually have to copy some parts of the DVD to memory, thus you need permission from the copyright owner to do that. Atleast the R/MAFIAA likes to think so.
        • Nope. You are allowed to play the thing. If playing requires making a temporary copy in memory then that is OK, because that is how a digital player works.

          An analogue player also makes copies - in the wires and in the air. In an analogue system the wires and air constitutes a delay line so your loudspeakers make an infinite number of copies between the paper cones and your ears. Even echoes off the walls in a room are copies.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by nsayer ( 86181 ) *
          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

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kamots ( 321174 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @02:06PM (#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.

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

        by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) * <slashdot@kadin.xoxy@net> on Friday May 25, 2007 @02:13PM (#19274275) Homepage Journal
        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?

      • Why should circumvention be illegal in the first place?

        Because if it wasn't, you wouldn't be able to encrypt your personal data (by which I mean any data or content to which you have legal ownership, which of course for the studios does include motion pictures and music albums). The incidental difficulty of keeping data under your control and exercising due diligence to protect that data are an integral part of prosecuting other types of law which come back to data in the Information Age--all of which is only protectable as it pertains to your Intellectual Pr

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Hymer ( 856453 )
      You have misunderstood something... this doesn't allow you to copy and distribute copyrighted material.
      This makes it legal to play your DVD's on a Linux box or whatever else and it makes it legal to make backup copies of your own DVD disks to any media you like (both these things were previously violations of the DMCA).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      Not quite a parallel. The ruling basically says that legal terminology which applies to the ignorant cannot be directly applied to the knowledgeable. With signage, it would be similar - if you can read the "keep off the grass" signs, you are in a different category from those who cannot - but the reverse.

  • So which politician... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lilomar ( 1072448 ) <lilomar2525@gmail.com> on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:39PM (#19273777) Homepage
    ...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: (Score:2)

      by qbwiz ( 87077 ) *

      a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

      Now, using DeCSS or the thousands of variants of that doesn't require the "authority of the copyright owner." Maybe that same logic the judge used could apply in the US, although the interpretation would be somewhat more strained.

    • ...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.

  • Nice... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:40PM (#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 @02:01PM (#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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        1) Well apart from slashdot where jury nullification seems to be all the rage (do you really want your laws overturned by a random dozen people), most seem to agree that if that's the case, they should get together for a vote and change the law. Otherwise it's only "sure we need the law to keep things civilized, but I get to break it a little..." like speeding.
        2) CSS isn't cracked by cornflakes decoder ring or a household tool or generic computer functionality. It held for several years before it was figure
    • if enough people break, consciously, a law, then one may assume the law was wrong in the first place and so it can't - or shouldn't be applied. After all laws should reflect the public interest, and it seems clear to me that the public is interested in being allowed to copy media. I wonder, how many people living in a resonable modern society which provides access to copying devices - Xerox machines, CD or DVD rewriters, computers, VHS recorders, you name it - has NEVER infringed copyright at some point? I

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

      It sounds pretty reasonable to me. One of the main reasons to have laws is to provide an agreeable structure for a society. If a sizeable chunk of the population is breaking (perhaps it is more illustrative to say "ignoring") law X, that's a good indicator that law X is unnecessary or unwanted. The wisest course of action for the governing body is to repeal such laws because that is what the people want.

    • If enough people are breaking a law, isn't it a good sign that said law might need reevaluated?

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

    by Husgaard ( 858362 ) on Friday May 25, 2007 @01:49PM (#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.

      • 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 up! Agreed 100%. It specifically says that the copy c

      • As other posters have also pointed out, the "[...] which achieves the protection objective" can be read as though achievement of a protection objective is needed for "technological measures" to be called "effective". However, in the same sentence we can read that even access control or protection by scrambling (which is known not to achieve this objective) is explicitly mentioned as something that can be done to make "technological measures" "effective".

        The InfoSoc directive is full of such contradiction

    • effective

      successful in producing a desired or intended result : effective solutions to environmental problems.

      (esp. of a law or policy) operative : the agreements will be effective from November.

      2 [ attrib. ] fulfilling a specified function in fact, though not formally acknowledged as such : the companies were under effective Soviet control. assessed according to actual rather than face value : an effective price of $176 million.

      from: Oxford's

      The key phrase here would be "intended result". The manufacture

  • Well, then (Score:5, Funny)

    by bccomm ( 709680 ) <mano155NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday May 25, 2007 @02:17PM (#19274325) Journal
    CSS is Finnished then.

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