[ILUG] copyright law in ireland...

[Garret]

Conor Daly wrote:
[snip]
> > So it would follow that if you are not doing anything that is not
> > unauthorised by the law then it should be ok.
> you mean "authorised by the copyright holder".  I as author of a work may
> authorise use of that work beyond the "normal" copyright rights (eg. the
> Open Documentation License or whatever it's called).

woops typo . Correct. What I was trying to get across was that I don't
think that copyright holders could use copy protection as a way of
removing or effectively nullifying the users fair dealing rights  as
they have tried in the U.S (on their 'fair use' rights) .

> 
> > If this is ture then use your rights under 'fair dealing' allow you to
> > play it on linux.
> >
> > : 50.-(1) Fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic
> > : work, sound recording, film, broadcast, cable programme, or non-
> > : electronic original database, for the purposes of research or private
> > : study, shall not infringe any copyright in the work.
> >
> However, if the playing of such a DVD under linux under "fair dealing"
> involves the *unauthorised* (eg. DeCss which has not been licensed with
> the relevant people) then you're infringing on the copyright by using
> something designed to *defeat* a rights protection measure (assuming that
> a court upholds the view that the DVD encryption is a copyright protection
> measure rather than a customer/viewer control measure.  I'd imagine that
> one could prove in court that the DVD encryption does *not* in any way
> prevent piracy of the work (a copied DVD will work on any *authorised* DVD
> player whether Windows or the Sony standalone) then it would be viewed as
> something *other* than a "rights protection measure").

Good points. 
Here's a question. If I own a licensed software dvd player (say a
windows one) 
Could I use section 81 of the copyright law to allow me to use the DeCSS
code from my windows player and make it interoperable with linux? 



[snip]
> 
> Don't assume from the above that I do or don't support the copyright
> legislation, I haven't enough detail to make such a choice.  I don't (and
> won't) buy either DVD Drives or discs.  Partially as a philosophical
> objection to the whole business of "customer control" but mostly 'cos I
> won't waste the cash on such stuff yet.  I see the PC mags are giving out
> DVDs now instead of CDROMs (Now you get ~2Gb of crap instead of 640Mb of
> crap.  Oh, I know there's some good stuff to be had but that's what
> sourceforge.net and tucows.com are for...).

Well I wouldn't go that far myself. Remembering of course that its not
the DVDs themselves that are copy protected , its the .VOB files written
on them that are. DVD disks are little more than bigger CDROM disks for
the most part.

-Garret