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European High Court Will Examine DRM Anti-Circumvention Rules
from the free-speech-anyone? dept
A European directive from a few years ago included a DRM anti-circumvention clause that even made it illegal to host an "organized discussion" of techniques for circumventing DRM. That seemed excessively broad (and unfairly limiting) to Mikko Rauhala, who set up a discussion site where people could discuss CSS, the notoriously lame copy protection used on DVDs that has been broken for ages. He did it mainly to get the issue into court -- which it did. Two years ago, a Finnish court had an odd ruling on the case, in which it claimed circumvention was okay if the DRM was ineffective. That's because the directive specifically claims that it applies to "effective DRM." Of course, taken to its logical conclusion, one might think that means if you can break DRM, then you haven't violated the anti-circumvention language, because you've proven that the DRM is ineffective. It's a bit of a logical pretzel. So, while I agree that it's silly to make discussion of circumvention illegal, the legal reasoning was a bit twisted.
So, it came as little surprise a year later, when an appeals court overturned the lower ruling. However, from a free speech perspective, this was still quite troubling. Banning any organized discussion about a technology seems tremendously questionable. The good news (as found via Michael Scott) is that the case is now going to the European Court of Human Rights. One hopes they'll recognize this as a violation of basic civil rights. It's troubling enough that simply circumventing copy protection on legally purchased goods is considered breaking the law. It's much worse to say that even talking about it is against the law.
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Reminds me of the time when discussing cryptography was banned in the US. Security by obscurity is never a good idea, some hacker who really doesn't care for your rules will figure crack your stuff, and you'll be worse because you didn't get a bunch of smart people to discuss the best possible security. Not that this applies to DRM directly. DRM will always be lame.
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Yes, drive the discussion underground so you aren't aware of the weaknesses of your protection schema. Brilliant.
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These types of rules regarding discussions sounds like a directive straight from MiniTrue.
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"(as found via Michael Scott,"
Either need to remove a comma and add a parentheses
(as found via Michael Scott)
or
Add a comma and remove a parentheses
,as found via Michael Scott,
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Re:
Oops. Fixed. Thanks!
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The directive doesn't outlaw organized discussion - it was the Finnish implementation of the directive that did.
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