[Infowarrior] - Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs ³ ineffective ²

[Richard Forno]

 Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs ³ineffective²
May 25th, 2007 by Mikko

http://www.turre.com/blog/?p=102

Below is the press release we sent and here¹s more detailed analysis of the
case and its potential implications.

* * *

Helsinki May 25, 2007
Turre Legal
Free for publication immediately

Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs ³ineffective²

In an unanimous decision released today, Helsinki District Court ruled that
Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is ³ineffective². The
decision is the first in Europe to interpret new copyright law amendments
that ban the circumvention of ³effective technological measures². 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, ³which achieves the protection objective.²

The background of the case was that after the copyright law amendment was
accepted in late 2005, a group of Finnish computer hobbyists and activists
opened a website where they posted information on how to circumvent CSS.
They appeared in a police station and claimed to have potentially infringed
copyright law. Most of the activists thought that either the police does not
investigate the case in the first place or the prosecutor drops it if it
goes any further. To the surprise of many, the case ended in the Helsinki
District Court. Defendants were Mikko Rauhala who opened the website, and a
poster who published an own implementation of source code circumventing CSS.

According to the court, CSS no longer achieves its protection objective. The
court relied on two expert witnesses and said that ³Šsince a Norwegian
hacker succeeded in circumventing CSS protection used in DVDs in 1999,
end-users have been able to get with ease tens of similar circumventing
software from the Internet even free of charge. Some operating systems come
with this kind of software pre-installed.² Thus, the court concluded that
³CSS protection can no longer be held Œeffective¹ as defined in law.² All
charges were dismissed.

Defendant Mikko Rauhala is happy about the judgment: ³It seems that one can
apply bad law with common sense, which was unfortunately absent during the
preparation of the law² he comments. Defendant¹s counsel Mikko Välimäki
thinks the judgment can have major implications: ³The conclusions of the
court can be applied all over Europe since the word Œeffective¹ comes
directly from the directive². He continues: ³A 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.²

Further information:

Mikko Välimäki
Defendants¹ counsel
tel. +358-50-5980498

Mikko Rauhala
Defendant who opened the forum