This could be a huge body blow to the dvd manufacturers and the legality of bypassing their DRM protection methods.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070525-finland-court-breaking-ineffective-copy-protection-is-permissible.htmlThe Helsinki District Court has dealt another blow to CSS, the copy-protection scheme used in commercial DVDs. In a ruling issued today, the court found that CSS is "ineffective" as a form of DRM and that the two defendants cited for violating Finnish copyright law were not guilty.
Two of the activists were charged with illegally manufacturing and distributing a circumventing product along with providing a service to "circumvent an effective technological measure." During the court proceedings, expert witnesses testified as to the ineffectiveness of CSS as a DRM system, an argument the court found compelling. "Since a Norwegian hacker succeeded in circumventing CSS protection used in DVDs in 1999, end-users have been able to get with easy tens of similar circumventing software from the Internet even free of charge," wrote the court. "Some operating systems come with this kind of software preinstalled.... CSS protection can no longer be held 'effective' as defined in law."
If further courts agree with this definition it would overnight remove the legal avenue of attack against those bypassing css encryption, meaning it would become legal to use software that decrypts the protection on DVD movies to make home backup copies, any effective protection must be just that, effective, css has been deemed not up to that level of definition anymore in this one court and I'm sure others will follow in the wake of this decision.
