James Delahunty
27 May 2008 2:14
The Helsinki Court of Appeals has overturned a controversial ruling made last year, which found that CSS copy protection in use on almost all retail movie DVDs was "ineffective". Finnish copyright law (amended in 2006 by adoption of EUCD) prohibits circumventing "effective technological measures", but the court original found that CSS cannot be described as an "efficient copy protection mechanism" anymore.
Within days of the ruling, the prosecutor announced plans to appeal the decision and on Monday, the Appeals Court overturned the original ruling. It rejected the District Court's judgment based on the objectives of DRM regulation.
However, there have been two major errors claimed in the appeals court decision. Firstly, the court claimed that circumventing an access control would have been legal but that the defendants had circumvented a full copy protection system (CSS). In reality, the defendants actually had only circumvented an access control.
Secondly, the court found that the circumvention was only legally ok if no additional software was installed to perform the process, and claimed that you always need to install some form of "hack" software to watch DVDs on Linux. Again, this is not true as you can get legal players that can play DVDs (VLC for example) and with some distros DVD-capable software comes standard.
The case began when several activists turned themselves in to a police station in the country admitting to running a website that shows how to circumvent CSS protection on DVDs. This was in response to the adoption of the new copyright restrictions in the country in late 2005. The next step now would be to take the case to the supreme court, but it may never happen as the court generally only hears 10% of all cases appealed.