5 ms·

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

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