CSS ruled as a "strong" method of copy protection

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.  

The Court of Appeal stated that "An standard, non-tech-savvy user cannot circumvent the protection by accident with his actions", although this was proven to be incorrect in the municipal court a year ago. The issue was then left without further justification. The Court of Appeal decided to alter the reality, though. It stated that "An ordinary Linux user" could not watch DVD movies (at least in 2006) without consiscously cracking the CSS protection. So what's the empirical meaning of all this? I don't think the urge to watch a DVD and download a legal player software in order to do so counts as cracking. Besides, I seriously doubt that the "Joe Average user" defined by Court Of Appeal has any knowledge of breaking any copy protection schemes in the first place.

The Court of Appeal said that the circumvention program (authored by the defendants) made the copying of copyrighted content possible in addition to simply watching. We threw a literary counter-argument that the defendants' program only did break the encryption and make watching DVD's possible. The program wasn't suitable for copying content. We have some paperback proof of this, not in any occasion did we claim otherwise. The Court of Appeal still insisted that the CSS system itself was originally designed to prevent copying and therefore any tampering with the encryption whatsoever - so decrypting the DVD for the purpose of watching is illegal.

A fact worth mentioning is that the court prefaced the judgement by announcing that this is not an issue of the credibility of the defense, but rather a juridical one. They did claim, however, that the counter-arguments provided by the defense in 2006 were "contradictory", which is definitely wrong.  When the Court of Appeal did change the facts presented in the municipal court, the clauses did include terms like "seemingly", which again is very troubling.

How unanimous were the jurisprudence itself afterall? The request for a pre-statement from the EU supreme court was denied by the claim that the Court of Appeal had received adequeate clarification of the sections and backgrounds involved and therefore the Court of Appeal was not obliged to request a statement from the EU. It didn't matter that the layout of the juridics had varied greatly in different documents presented during the hearings.

Ultimately the CoA declared that both of the defendants were guilty of criminal activity in accordance of the original suit: the circumvention of a technical procedure and an illegal decryption service. However, the defendants went unpunished due to the fact that they had given themselves in to the police and cooperated extensively to sort out their criminal activities.

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