Boing Boing: Breaking DVD DRM is legal in Finland

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Friday, May 25, 2007

Breaking DVD DRM is legal in Finland

Herrko writes in with amazing news -- it's legal to break DVD DRM in Finland, because the law only protects "effective" DRM, and DVD DRM is so easy to crack that it no longer qualifies:

Our law firm's client was released as Finnish court today ruled that the charges must be dropped for the two defendants that had "organized discussion" of breaking a technical protection systems.
According to the court, CSS (the DRM on DVDs) no longer achieves its protection objective. The court relied on two expert witnesses and said that "since 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." Thus, the court concluded that "CSS protection can no longer be held "effective" as defined in law." All charges were dismissed.

Link (Thanks, Herkko!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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