In an unanimous decision, a Helsinki District Court has ruled that the 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 legislation is based on the EU Copyright Directive from 2001. According to both Finnish copyright law and the underlying directive, only such protection measure is effective, which achieves the protection objective.
The background of the case was that after the copyright law amendment was passed in late 2005, a group of Finnish computer hobbyists and activists opened a web site containing information detailing how to circumvent CSS. Subsequently they turned themselves in at a police station, admitting to potential copyright law infringement. Most of the activists thought that either the police would not investigate the case - or it would be dropped by the prosecutor before reaching court. However, a case was brought before a Helsinki District Court, raising charges against Mikko Rauhala, the operator of the web site, and an individual posting source code circumventing CSS that he had developed.
According to the court ruling, CSS no longer achieves its protection objective. The court relied on two expert witnesses and said that since a Norwegian hacker succeeded in circumventing the CSS protection used in DVDs in 1999, end-users have been able to easily acquire tens of similar circumventing software programs from the Internet free of charge. Some operating systems come with this kind of software pre-installed. Thus, the court concluded that CSS protection can no longer be held effective as defined in law. All charges were dismissed.
Defendant Mikko Rauhala is pleased with the judgment: It seems that one can apply bad law with common sense, which was unfortunately absent during the preparation of the law he comments.
Councel for the defendants, Mikko Vlimki, thinks the judgment can have major implications: The conclusions of the court can be applied all over Europe since the word effective comes directly from the directive. He continues: A protection measure is no longer effective when widely available end-user software implementing a circumvention method exists. 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.
[This is an interesting ruling although, being from a lower court, it does not set any precedent. Interpreted a little frivolously it states that if you can crack a protection scheme then it is not effective and hence it is not illegal to circumvent it. Finally a victory for the fair use camp? --Ed].
Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.turre.com/blog/?p=102
Taken from Information Security Bulletin.