Back in 2005, a group of activists opposing the new EU copyright law amendment implemented late that year set up a website with information on how to circumvent the DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS) system; a copy protection system that was broken by a Norwegian hacker in 1999 and where software and info for breaking it is widely available online. They then turned themselves in at a police station claiming to have potentially infringed copyright law. However, while most thought that the police would simply not investigate or that the prosecutor would later drop it, this case ended up landing them at the Helsinki District Court.
Unfortunately for the movie studios, the court ruled that the CSS copy protection used in DVDs is ineffective, since it no longer achieves its protection objective and the court dismissed all charges. The court relied on two expert witnesses explaining how CSS was broken back in 1999, that similar circumventing software is widely available and that some operating systems even include this kind of software pre-installed.
The defendant Mikko Rauhala who opened this website is happy about the judgement saying that common sense was not used in preparing this law. The other defendant, Mikko Välimäki, thinks that this judgment may have major implications in that it can be applied all over Europe and understands that this is not technology-dependent and thus could potentially be applied to Blu-ray & HD DVD copy protection.
More detailed information on this can be read on Ars Technica and in this Press Release. Thanks to Liggy for letting us know about his news.
