Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Finnish Court Declares Open Season For Hacking DRM

Via podcastingnews.com -

An unusual ruling in Finnish courts appears to have declared that it’s open season for hacking DRM’d media.

In an unanimous decision, the 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 legislation is based on 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.”

If the ruling is upheld, it could have long-term implications for copy-protection technology in European.

EU member nations were required to implement the EU’s copyright directive, which says a technology is effective “where the use of a protected work or other subject-matter is controlled by the rights-holders 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.”

In other words, if you can hack it, the DRM isn’t effective and isn’t covered by EU restrictions.

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