5 ms·

> I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies At least in France (possibly EU) it is (droit à la copie privée), there's even

by lloeki 3y ago

> I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies At least in France (possibly EU) it is (droit à la copie privée), there's even a tax for that, paid on every storage device, whether or not it's intended to store such media. Yup the tax is about paying for a copy of something you already own. You can rip anything all you want from a source medium you own. But you can't fetch it from another source even if you do own an original medium and the resulting data is 1:1 identical down to the last literal bit. The bits have a legal colour depending on where they come from!

thfuran 3y ago
In the US, you're legally entitled to create a backup copy, but breaking the encryption on the disc to actually do so is illegal.
tombert 3y ago
I believe in the states, it's technically illegal to break DRM most of the time, though I think there's a million possible exceptions, and I don't know how much it has actually been tested in court. I figure, though, that if I'm buying a legit copy of the blu-ray, and I'm not distributing copies to people, I'm probably not very high up on Disney's "sue them" list, even if I am technically breaking a rule.
- sp332 3y ago
  Ripping your own media is a civil violation, small stakes for a blu-ray collection. Where people really get in trouble is distribution. Private sharing like a Plex server among friends could get you in more trouble, but public sharing like bittorrent, or anything commercial like charging for access to your Plex, is where it really starts to attract attention from the lawyers.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Yeah, more or less what I figured. Right now at least, I don't even have the port opened on my network, so the only way to watch it is to be logged in via my network, or do some kind of VPN/proxy into the network. I really doubt that it would be worth it for a company to sue me for it. To be honest, I think that it's a pretty stupid law; obviously distributing the media makes sense to be illegal, but I think it's idiotic to make breaking DRM illegal.
saurik 3y ago
France is on the hook -- along with the rest of the EU -- for having a similar anti-circumvention law to the US (which is part of a treaty that the US pushed forward), but apparently hasn't implemented one yet? I hadn't realized this (I thought everyone had long ago put in place similar laws) and am excited to have found a good reference on the status for various countries. https://cyber.harvard.edu/media/files/eucd.pdf https://cyber.harvard.edu/media/files/eucd.pdf
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  That paper is nearly twenty years old. Breaking DRM to format shift in France is illegal and has been for many years.
  - saurik 3y ago
    Oh, thanks. I somehow remember considering it was obsolete but then had some apparently very wrong reason why that wasn't the case. This matches my understanding better.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    It's quite a lot more involved than such a blanket statement. This has been ruled in court. See the "Mullholand Drive" case, where a consumer (backed by UFC Que Choisir) sued producer/distributor/whatever for the inability to rip their DVD. Case was tortuous with back and forths, ultimately Cour de Cassation 28 février 2006 ruled that the use of DRM was legal in consideration of international agreements and so that the case was moot. Then Cour d'Appel Paris 4 avril 2007 ruled that copie privée is not a right but an exception and that as such it meant that a consumer cannot sue on limitations caused by DRM, but that they can use the exception as a defense should they be accused of copyright infrigement. DADVSI is more annoying, as it regulates the making, distribution, import, possession in view of selling, lending or renting, of DRM breaking tools, as well as (defined separately) working around DRM is made illegal, irrespective of exceptions. BUT this only applies to DRM schemes that are deemed effective, which DVD's CSS is not (I seem to recall this has been ruled somewhere), making libdvdcss legal to use and distribute. It is in fact OOTB packaged in VLC, hosted in France, and if it were illegal Videolan would have been sued to oblivion. Arguably MakeMKV decodes BluRays with actual keys, so is arguably not an DRM breaking tool (like libdvdcss is) but merely a decryption tool using a legit process and legit keys, no different than a BluRay player. One could argue that rendering the file immediately to a screen or to a file is fundamentally different, but these laws take all sorts of considerations like copies in buffers and whatnot (and yes in the debate at some point majors wanted you to pay for the in-memory buffer copies that happens when decoding MP3 which is astoundingly ridiculous). So the decoding process is not DRM breaking and the storage of the decrypted result is not that different from these buffers, except it's a bit longer lived. But there's one more thing: in addition, the same DADVSI defines that DRM must not prevent interoperability as long as author rights are respected, as well as cannot oppose free usage of the work or protected item in accordance with author rights. Well, Conseil d'Etat 16 juillet 2008 ruled that usage of FOSS software to work around DRM for interoperability purposes is legal. The pain point is MakeMKV is only partially FOSS but DADVSI says nothing about things being FOSS and I don't think anyone is going to ever get sued for making private copies of their legally owned BuRays for their sole usage in order to play content on a variety of devices and OSes they use and would otherwise be unable to play without being decrypted. https://www.droit-technologie.org/actualites/le-regime-de-lexception-de-la-copie-privee-en-droit-francais/ https://www.droit-technologie.org/actualites/le-regime-de-le... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss#En_France https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss#En_France

by lloeki 3y ago

thfuran 3y ago

In the US, you're legally entitled to create a backup copy, but breaking the encryption on the disc to actually do so is illegal.

tombert 3y ago

I believe in the states, it's technically illegal to break DRM most of the time, though I think there's a million possible exceptions, and I don't know how much it has actually been tested in court. I figure, though, that if I'm buying a legit copy of the blu-ray, and I'm not distributing copies to people, I'm probably not very high up on Disney's "sue them" list, even if I am technically breaking a rule.

sp332 3y ago
Ripping your own media is a civil violation, small stakes for a blu-ray collection. Where people really get in trouble is distribution. Private sharing like a Plex server among friends could get you in more trouble, but public sharing like bittorrent, or anything commercial like charging for access to your Plex, is where it really starts to attract attention from the lawyers.
- tombert 3y ago
  Yeah, more or less what I figured. Right now at least, I don't even have the port opened on my network, so the only way to watch it is to be logged in via my network, or do some kind of VPN/proxy into the network. I really doubt that it would be worth it for a company to sue me for it. To be honest, I think that it's a pretty stupid law; obviously distributing the media makes sense to be illegal, but I think it's idiotic to make breaking DRM illegal.

saurik 3y ago

France is on the hook -- along with the rest of the EU -- for having a similar anti-circumvention law to the US (which is part of a treaty that the US pushed forward), but apparently hasn't implemented one yet? I hadn't realized this (I thought everyone had long ago put in place similar laws) and am excited to have found a good reference on the status for various countries. https://cyber.harvard.edu/media/files/eucd.pdf https://cyber.harvard.edu/media/files/eucd.pdf

Mindwipe 3y ago
That paper is nearly twenty years old. Breaking DRM to format shift in France is illegal and has been for many years.
- saurik 3y ago
  Oh, thanks. I somehow remember considering it was obsolete but then had some apparently very wrong reason why that wasn't the case. This matches my understanding better.
- lloeki 3y ago
  It's quite a lot more involved than such a blanket statement. This has been ruled in court. See the "Mullholand Drive" case, where a consumer (backed by UFC Que Choisir) sued producer/distributor/whatever for the inability to rip their DVD. Case was tortuous with back and forths, ultimately Cour de Cassation 28 février 2006 ruled that the use of DRM was legal in consideration of international agreements and so that the case was moot. Then Cour d'Appel Paris 4 avril 2007 ruled that copie privée is not a right but an exception and that as such it meant that a consumer cannot sue on limitations caused by DRM, but that they can use the exception as a defense should they be accused of copyright infrigement. DADVSI is more annoying, as it regulates the making, distribution, import, possession in view of selling, lending or renting, of DRM breaking tools, as well as (defined separately) working around DRM is made illegal, irrespective of exceptions. BUT this only applies to DRM schemes that are deemed effective, which DVD's CSS is not (I seem to recall this has been ruled somewhere), making libdvdcss legal to use and distribute. It is in fact OOTB packaged in VLC, hosted in France, and if it were illegal Videolan would have been sued to oblivion. Arguably MakeMKV decodes BluRays with actual keys, so is arguably not an DRM breaking tool (like libdvdcss is) but merely a decryption tool using a legit process and legit keys, no different than a BluRay player. One could argue that rendering the file immediately to a screen or to a file is fundamentally different, but these laws take all sorts of considerations like copies in buffers and whatnot (and yes in the debate at some point majors wanted you to pay for the in-memory buffer copies that happens when decoding MP3 which is astoundingly ridiculous). So the decoding process is not DRM breaking and the storage of the decrypted result is not that different from these buffers, except it's a bit longer lived. But there's one more thing: in addition, the same DADVSI defines that DRM must not prevent interoperability as long as author rights are respected, as well as cannot oppose free usage of the work or protected item in accordance with author rights. Well, Conseil d'Etat 16 juillet 2008 ruled that usage of FOSS software to work around DRM for interoperability purposes is legal. The pain point is MakeMKV is only partially FOSS but DADVSI says nothing about things being FOSS and I don't think anyone is going to ever get sued for making private copies of their legally owned BuRays for their sole usage in order to play content on a variety of devices and OSes they use and would otherwise be unable to play without being decrypted. https://www.droit-technologie.org/actualites/le-regime-de-lexception-de-la-copie-privee-en-droit-francais/ https://www.droit-technologie.org/actualites/le-regime-de-le... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss#En_France https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss#En_France