Finnish Court Of Appeal: “Decrypting DVD’s in Linux Now Illegal” 

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The Finnish Court Of Appeal (”Hovioikeus” in finnish) declared its final judgement yesterday in the so-called “CSS case”. The standard municipal court of Helsinki did find the defendants not guilty a year ago.

However, to everyone’s surprise, Helsinki Court of Appeal announced today that (quoting the official statement):

“… circumventing the [CSS] copy protection at least in a Linux system had required the installation of a circumvention program. The fact whether the program was installed with permission or not is irrelevant.”

In some Linux distributions, circumventing the protection, or watching DVD movies in laymen’s terms, is an out-of-the-box-feature. Unfortunately the Court of Appeal apparently thought that if a Linux distribution does not include such a media player, the download of some “shady” or “illegal” cracking software would be necessary in order to watch a copy protected DVD. It is true that some Linux distributions do not include the DVD decrypting component as default and require a media player such as VLC or mplayer to be installed. After all, Linux is a modular system after all and the need to install some extra components manually is common practice. But does that mean the media player software should be primarily advertised as circumvention devices for the CSS encryption? There used to be an exception in the Finnish law which allowed watching DVD’s for private use, but the clause is definitely more or less vague after a declaration of this kind.

Which means, for a linux user in Finland, it is now legal to download an unencrypted pirated version of the movie and watch it (but make sure to use a program that doesn’t upload), and it is illegal to buy a dvd and try to watch that.

I think they didn’t think their cunning plan through….

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