ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_250507

DVD copy protection "ineffective", rules Finnish court

Just released, Turre Legal says that CSS has been found officially ineffective:

In an unanimous decision released today, Helsinki District Court ruled that Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is “ineffective”. The decision is the first in Europe to interpret new copyright law amendments that ban the circumvention of “effective technological measures”.

The way I interpret this is that it is therefore legal to crack the DVD content protection for your own purposes, e.g. watching it on Linux computers, or converting it to something which can be played back on a cell phone. Obviously, it is still not legal to distribute the content without permission... But that wasn't the point. The point was to find out exactly what does "organized discussion" mean in the context of cryptanalysis/DRM. Unfortunately, I don't think this was achieved, as the CSS restrictions management system was deemed outright ineffective without actual decision on what constitutes "organized discussion". But it's still a reasonable result.

Thanks to the people who went through the trouble of organizing this. Much like a lot of the copyright discussion in Finland, this was a grassroots effort by a number of people, who decided to give themselves in to the police as criminals for discussing DVD encryption.