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German Library Allowed To Crack Copy Protection
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jan 19, 2005 04:03 AM
from the clashing-aims dept.
from the clashing-aims dept.
AlexanderT writes "The EU Directive 2001/29/EU (also known as the European Copyright Directive) has made it "a criminal offence to break or attempt to break the copy protection or access control systems on digital content such as music, videos, eBooks, and software".
Since today, at least in Germany there is one notable exception: The Deutsche Bibliothek, Germany's national library and bibliographic information center, has received a "license to copy", i.e. the official authorization to crack and duplicate DRM-protected e-books and other digital media such as CD-Audio and CD-Roms.
The Deutsche Bibliothek achieved an agreement with the German Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the German Booksellers and Publishers Association after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works."
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8-bit museum (Score:3, Funny)
Re:8-bit museum (Score:3, Funny)
Oh joy. Eternaly preserved load screens with "Cracked by xxxxxx" "Greetz to...." and "k-rad 0-day vvarzz". And worse yet... eternaly preserved bogus hex-edited credits that say "Cracked by Kaptain K Mart".
Re:German Phonographic Industry (Score:3, Funny)
Right to read (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-rea
It'll take you 5 minutes to get through but I think everyone should check it out
Re:Why does his link not work? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why does his link not work? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why does his link not work? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Right to read (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want unlimited rights to the content, I want unlimited rights to listening to the content, and this is what I bought...
Parent
Re:Right to read (Score:4, Insightful)
"Breaking into someone's copy-protected CD" is one thing, but I don't see the relevance. Why would I break into someone else's CD? The thing is, I'm breaking into my own copy-protected CD. I bought the CD, it's mine.
Is it wrong to "break into" my own car?
Parent
Re:Right to read (Score:5, Insightful)
Building an exact copy of the car and selling it would be more like creating CDs with someone else's copyrighted work, and selling them. But that's not what I'm talking about at all. I am simply talking about the right to do with my own CD as I damn well please.
You really should go back to analogy school and get your shit sorted out. Your analogies suck.
Parent
Re:Right to read (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong. And lets dispense with the stupid-ass car analogy.
When you buy a book, you buy the book completely in the absence of any further valid agreement otherwise. You do NOT just buy a right to read the book. You buy the book and get the right to do anything with it as a piece of personal property: read it, don't read it, give it away, burn it, etc.
What you buy, basically, is the right to use the book in absolutely any way, however you see fit, the right to extend that use to others (or take it back, as you like), and the right to dispose of the book in any manner.
This is the same whether you buy a book, or a baseball bat, or pretty much anything else.
The most relevant thing you get is access. Access to the intangible, unownable work that is expressed within the book. That is, if you own the paperback, you can access it to read the story within. If you don't, then the owner can determine whether you get to read the book, handle it, etc. which may as a practical matter limit your access to the story it contains.
Independently of all this, there MAY also be a copyright. A copyright is a negative right; it is not a right to do things or to allow others to do things. It is a right only to prevent other people from doing things.
Additionally, there is only a very short list of things it pertains to: reading is not one of them. Thus while a copyright holder can prevent other people from reproducing a work, he cannot prevent other people from simply reading it.
Thus the copyright holder cannot grant other people the right to read, since a) he can't grant rights, only promise not to himself prohibit them from doing things, and b) he has no authority over reading to begin with. Only reproduction, distribution, etc. which may, but doesn't necessarily, confer some control over access to the books, as distinct from the copyrighted works within the books.
Now, this is only a right to prohibit others. That's important! It means that other people must derive their right to read -- aside from matters of access -- from another source. In fact, since the copyright is a right of prohibition, it means that the right to actually do those things, a right we have accepted can be temporarily curtailed, must likewise derive from a different source than the mere copyright holder.
Because when the copyright expires, this means that the copyright holder can no longer prohibit others from doing things. Now they can exercise the right that they had all along, and do things that would've been infringing had they been done before.
Since these things are identical to the things the copyright holder likely was doing (and remembering that the copyright never conferred on him the right to do those things, only to prohibit others (this shows up a lot where there are two authors and two copyrights, one controlling on the other)) the copyright holder must've gotten his right to do those things from the same source as the rest of us.
That source is God. The right of free speech (which encompasses both expressing and receiving speech) is where the right to read and the right to make copies etc. come from.
We limit this a bit in the pursuit of some of the goals of our society (c.f. libel laws, advertising regulations) but ultimately we let it go unconstrained.
There are many practical examples of this:
Mark Twain was a noted American author who was very much in favor of ever expanding if not perpetual copyright (since after all it would make him more money, and he was bad with money so he needed more). IMO he was kind of an asshole. He NEVER would have wanted anyone to read his books without paying per read, and NEVER would've wanted people to get to make copies of his books without paying handsomely for the privilege.
But his books are in the public domain; I can read and reproduce them at will, for free. If he or his estate had even the slightest right to prevent this, I assure you, they'd use it as much as possible. They don't, illustrating my point, and ultimately showing us all that you are (in legal terms) a doofus.
Parent
Re:Right to read (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Right to read (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a problem already happening right now: I still use old programs on my 386, programs I can't use anymore on Windows 9X or even XP (shared-memory, not enough EMS...). I have to install emulators to use them and even "crack" their copy protection just to launch them.
Parent
Re:Right to read (Score:3, Informative)
[Talking about USA here.] Prior to the 2004 Blizzard decision, the "someone" was you; you were breaking into your own CD. For the period of 1789 through late 2004, whenever you bought a CD, you owned the CD. You owned a copy of the contents of the CD. You owned the software. You did not license it.
In spite of the fact that you owned the software on the CD, someone else held the copyright on this stuff that you owned, so th
Re:Right to read (Score:3, Insightful)
If literally anything can be property, why not
Just goes to show... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just goes to show... (Score:4, Insightful)
To take one example of why such a concept is a bad idea, say the Department of Transportation is legally required to build roads for the betterment of society. Very few people believe that the government should be able to just kick people off their land, confiscate their houses, and bulldoze them without compensation (even with compensation, as currently exists under eminent domain laws, this is a very controversial issue).
Granted, the damage you do to the value of intellectual property by copying it is much less than the damage done to the value of real estate by bulldozing it, by the underlying concept is very much the same.
Parent
Re:Just goes to show... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just look at what happens after X years. It goes to the public domain. That would be a seizure of the property, to place it into the public domain. And that is done for the public benefit, right?
Whoops! It would be illegal for the government to do that without paying the owner compensation for taking his property! So either the expiration of every copyright and patent is an illegal seisure by the government, or there is something wrong with the model we just laid out.
I'm going to specifically refer to the US legal system (it's the one I know), but the theory should be pretty generally valid. If you actually read the Supreme Court ruling on the basis of copyright and patent laws, they make it perfectly clear that the fundamental state of "intellectual creations" is that they lie in the public domain. To any extent that it is "property", it is public property. This is the point where copyright and patent law come into the picture. They were created to encourage more intellectual creation and to encourage them to be contributed to the public domain. A limited bundle of copy rights or patent rights is taken from the public and temporarily given to the creator. That taking from the public is done for the public benefit.
Which now makes it perfectly clear why library copying and fair use and other premitted copying and use is not a taking from the copyright holder. The copyright holder was never granted exclusive rights to those uses in the first place. The bundle of rights given to the copyright holder does not include any right to object to this library usage.
The US Supreme court has directly ruled that copyright is a limited "bundle of rights" and that it is NOT some ordinary peice of propery. And while copyright infringment is a violation of the law, the Supreme Court ruled that it does not equate to theft. Copyrighted works are covered by copyright law, not property law.
The term "intellectual property" is very bad because it gives the impression that the normal implications of property law apply. It leads to erroneous conclusions about copyright, like the appearance that the expiration of copyright is a "taking" from the "property owner". People often rationalize fair use and other copyright exceptions as a "taking" from the owner for the pubic benefit. Both are backwards logic. The expiration of copyright is merely the expiration of certain rights the public has loaned to the creator. Any copying and usage that is leagally non-infringing is simply something which was never given to the creator in the first place.
-
Parent
Re:Wrong laws (Score:3, Insightful)
Quick Question (Score:2, Interesting)
If Joe Sixpack kills someone and is forgiven, why shouldn't anyone else be? While that is an extreme (and criminal) analogy, it is unfair that the law does not treat everyone equally.
I'm sure a good lawyer could argue out this point - if X can be exempted, why can't Y be exempted if his reasons are quite similar?
Re:Quick Question (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Quick Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically they may still be breaking the law by cracking the DRM, but since they're doing so with the permission of the publishers, it'd be silly to call them to task for it.
Parent
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, anything (software, documentation, game data) I ever published as myself went with a free license -- and they're pretty useless for a library, but that certainly isn't the case for a majority of authors. Remember: RIAA, MPAA, and in this case, GFPI and GBPA are not everything.
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Informative)
This is really just a special kind of Compulsory Purchase Order. It might be temporarily unpopular with a few individuals, but the benefits to Society At Large outweigh the inconvenience it may cause them. And one can presume that an organisation like a National Library probably will t
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Informative)
The law as written gives them no such authority, whether the copyright holders allow it or not. You might wish it to work differently, but the copyright holders have no authority to grant anyone the right to break DRM - even their own. It's a criminal offense regardless.
Look up the law in question if you think otherwise.
Max
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course it's not illegal. What if I've lost my key, or the door is jammed, etc, etc... and I ask someone, say a locksmith, to break in to my house. Just about any act short of murder is not illegal if the person you're doing it to has and is capable of giving permission. Sorry, but a silly analogy proves nothing (not that a
Re:Quick Question (Score:4, Interesting)
If Joe Sixpack kills someone and is forgiven, why shouldn't anyone else be? While that is an extreme (and criminal) analogy, it is unfair that the law does not treat everyone equally.
Not really, circumstances matter. An extreme example: an enemy soldier that kills soldier on your side in a battle is not guilty of murder even though he's an enemy (and vice versa your side killing enemy soldiers). But if you purposefully kill a soldier on your side, you're not only guilty of murder, but possibly of treason/sabotage also, even if you're a soldier too.
Do you call that unfair, too?
Well, in this case it'd mean the lawyer would have to show that Y has legal (or moral or somesuch) obligation to do something which requires breaking the copy protection... I wouldn't bet on success, no matter how good the lawyer was at twisting words.
Parent
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Informative)
The EUCD [ukcdr.org] [http://ukcdr.org] explicitly states:
and:
In Australia (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems odd that a library should be alowed to do something, yet the German public can not. Was it to affect me, I'd lobby against the law. Write politicians and such. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, though such exemptions are usually a good start for more stupid laws.
This is important (Score:4, Insightful)
It is important that knowledge and information be available to all now, and years down the track. Particularly if the company that made the DRM is no longer around, or the hardware no longer made.
Information needs to be preserved and accessible and useful for all generations, not just for a companies short term profit.
Bond. Johannes Bond. (Score:3, Funny)
Now, if only they could decompile stuff too... (Score:5, Interesting)
(BTW, I do realize that software isn't included in their mandate, but it's still an important related issue!)
More EUCD Information (Score:4, Informative)
Copyright: for the betterment of society (Score:4, Insightful)
Reworking Copyright [intencha.com] pretty much covers how I feel about copyright.. (though not written by me).
For example , Gandhi was a great proponent of "Making money is not evil" (being from a business community) unlike the England educated Nehru's socialism. People rarely distinguish between the cost of an object and it's price :).. As long as the price is not paid by society (rather than an induvidual) , copyright holds. Interestingly society profits when an induvidual pays or that's the way copyright was supposed to work.
But how will they do it? (Score:5, Interesting)
The German implementation is probably similar. My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?
Re:But how will they do it? (Score:4, Informative)
I would have thought the article tells you this. The german government wrote into law an exception that said that the German Library could produce and own tools to do it since it was impossible to carry out their legal functions without such an excemption. I would assume that this is legal since their is an excemption in the EU copyright directive to allow member states to make such exceptions (e.g)
(34) Member States should be given the option of providing for certain exceptions or limitations for cases such as educational and scientific purposes, for the benefit of public institutions such as libraries and archives,
Parent
Great, it doesn't solve the problem though. (Score:4, Interesting)
Take subito (http://www.subito-doc.de/) for example. It's a service provided by university libraries that let's you order copies of articles in case the relevant journal is not available in your local library. Now with universities always getting less money than actually needed, it's quite common that much of the journals you need are not available locally and so subito really provides a very useful service to students and scholars.
However, this will probably stop in a short while as there is a legal battle raging against it brought by the same institutions that gave the Deutsche Bibliothek to crack DRM.
To sum it up, these laws are in fact hindering innovation and research in Germany (and I'm sure also in other countries) right now and to give some special rights to one library won't change that.
Cracking? By whom? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see the gray-hair-in-a-knot granny librarian soft-icing her way through the latest Safedisc protection...
Feeding them their own medicine (Score:4, Funny)
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
The German Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the German Booksellers and Publishers Association didn't want this agency getting the entire law overturned. A potential ally for the little guys in their struggle against these stupid laws has just been bought off.
At the same time, they get the added benefit of making it look like these two groups are in charge of the law and can exempt people from it.
In the US, if the RIAA said it was okay for a library to crack it's copy protection mechanisms (haha), would that be okay under the DMCA?
I mean, if they can do that, that seems to mean that it's okay for ANYONE who has the legal right to copy a protected work to break the copy protection mechanisms prevent that legal use.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming they are the sole owner of the copy protection mechanism and the works, why not? If I took your property without permission, it is called stealing (note to trolls: physical property, not IP), and is illegal. If you gave permission, it is called giving it away, and is legal.
Of course, I don't quite understand it. Why wouldn't they simply recieve a non-DRM copy?
How they try to justify the decision... (Score:3, Insightful)
The official press release states [www.ddb.de] that, "Das Urheberrechtsgesetz sieht so genannte Schrankenregelungen vor, nach denen der Zugang zu urheberrechtlich geschützten Werken zu bestimmten Zwecken, wie zum Beispiel für wissenschaftliche und kulturelle Nutzungen, zulässig ist. Die letzte Novelle des Gesetzes, deren einschlägige Regelungen im September 2004 in Kraft getreten sind, sieht hierfür ausdrücklich die Möglichkeit von Vereinbarungen zwischen Verbänden vor, um diese Nutzungen auch von kopiergeschützten Medien zu ermöglichen."
I think they are referring to this particular revision [bmj.bund.de] in the German copyright law, which apparantly states that associations such as the Phonographic Industry have the right to allow particular institutions, such as the National Library, to duplicate copyright-protected media (for the sake of science and culture).
Alex,
MobileRead.com [mobileread.com]
In Sweden...:D (Score:5, Interesting)
(This is the case against the cracker group DOD, Drink or Die. While the American members all got jailed the Swedish member (who actually did most of the cracking) was freed of all charges)
And yes, Sweden is also in the EU but thankfully our local laws can override BS laws like this (i think)
Pretty Meaningless (Score:4, Interesting)
I only need to point to the TCPA/Palladium/locked-bios architectures that pop up every so often--if you're someone who thinks DRM will 'always be crackable as long as the content can be seen,' I have to suggest that maybe you aren't fully taking in the DRM onslaught that is about to take place. If content decoding only takes place in your speakers, monitor, etc, with watermarked/recorder-distorting tech within the images themselves, are you really prepared to crack open your monitor and speaker, braving deadly electrical currents, to solder around a connection or two in order to get a clean signal? What about when it all happens within a single piece of silicon?
The German Bibliothek basically won the rights they already had before the EU/CD and which any logical person would argue they had as a matter of course. What they've lost in this 'victory' is the future.
Re:Uhh..okay? Library with no money? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uhh..okay? Library with no money? (Score:2)
Re:Uhh..okay? Library with no money? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uhh..okay? Library with no money? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Teenage school boys? (Score:3, Funny)