German Library Allowed To Crack Copy Protection

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."

More EUCD Information

[MartijnH]

Here's also a great site on the EUCD [euro-copyrights.org]

Re:Uhh..okay? Library with no money?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not about not having money or not having legit copies. The national library is allowed to copy media for archiving purposes, e.g. copy a CD to another medium to prevent loss due to decay or to preserve the data after the CD format has become obsolete.

Re:Why does his link not work?

[Gob Blesh It]

Please visit Slashcode bug #981137 [sourceforge.net], which concerns automatically hyperlinking URLs in "Plain Old Text" mode, and add a comment to show your support for a speedy resolution. No progress has been made on this trivial feature request for longer than six months.

Re:Quick Question

[mrogers]

Actually the EUCD does provide a specific exemption for public libraries, provided they have no other way of getting a non-copy-protected version of the data. However, the EUCD is implemented differently in different EU member states, and implementations can choose which exemptions to include. What's legal in Germany might not be legal in the UK, for example, if and when the UK ever gets round to implementing the Directive.

Re:Why does his link not work?

[Grey Ninja]

In the meantime, there's plain text links [mozilla.org]. :)

Re:But how will they do it?

[term8or]

My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?

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, ....

Re:Quick Question

[ajs318]

The Library is obliged to preserve copies of copyrighted material ready for its entry into the Public Domain. Since it gets this job by Government mandate, then anything standing in the way of it doing this job has to go.

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 take reasonable steps to prevent a premature release.

The library is still breaking the law, wether or not the publishers gave them permission (which is not for them to give).

No, it is entirely for them to give. The copyright holder -- usually the publisher -- is by definition absolutely entitled to grant permission to make copies of their copyrighted work. That's how the GPL works.

Re:Quick Question

[Gone Jackal]

The EUCD [ukcdr.org] [http://ukcdr.org] explicitly states:

(30) The rights referred to in this Directive may be transferred, assigned or subject to the granting of contractual licences, without prejudice to the relevant national legislation on copyright and related rights.

and:

(33) The exclusive right of reproduction should be subject to an exception to allow certain acts of temporary reproduction, which are transient or incidental reproductions, forming an integral and essential part of a technological process and carried out for the sole purpose of enabling either efficient transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or a lawful use of a work or other subject-matter to be made. The acts of reproduction concerned should have no separate economic value on their own. To the extent that they meet these conditions, this exception should include acts which enable browsing as well as acts of caching to take place, including those which enable transmission systems to function efficiently, provided that the intermediary does not modify the information and does not interfere with the lawful use of technology, widely recognised and used by industry, to obtain data on the use of the information. A use should be considered lawful where it is authorised by the rightholder or not restricted by law.

Take a look at the text for similar clauses. In other words, if I understand this correctly, this is firstly a question of academic or research usage, secondly a matter of agreement which can be made between any party and the copyright holder.

This doesn't mean that the law sucks any less, but that this agreement is nothing unusual, and has nothing to do with "special rights" granted to a particular class of people/organisations. I haven't been able to find the actual text of the agreement, though. It could be that the National Library in Germany will be paying copy-fees, or similar, for their reproductions.

Re:In Sweden...:D

[Anonymous Coward]

thankfully our local laws can override BS laws like this (i think)

No, Union law is above member state law (in most cases). And Sweden have been fined for not implementing the infococ directive.

Basically, the EUCD/Infosoc is already valid in Sweden, but since a lot of clauses were optional, not all of it would be.

But, IANAL so what do I know... :)

Re:Right to read

[Sloppy]

Why doesn't the same logic apply to breaking into someone's copy-protected CD?

[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 there were of course many restrictions on what you could do with it. In 1997-1998, a bunch of new restrictions (DMCA) were added. But you still owned what you bought.

And in 2004, some judges (not legislators) changed it from "you own it but someone else has copyrighted it" to "someone else owns it, and when you thought you were buying it, the merchant was not actually transferring title to you, because he did not HAVE title to it, therefore you must be using it under the terms of some license."

Strange but true.

Re:Quick Question

[maxpublic]

and by virtue of that fact they are automatically entitled to break the encryption.

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