[ILUG] Legality of commercial DVD playback.

[Phil Bradley]

My totally unqualified response:


As far as I can tell, the latest act in Irish law relating to copyright 
is the Copyright and related rights act, 2000. Section 81 states that 
you can adapt a computer program in order to achieve interoperability as 
long as you don't go beyond what is necessary to do so. This doesn't 
exactly cover the case of decrypting the data on a DVD but it is close. 
It makes no reference to copy protection mechanisms as far as I 
remember. The relevant section is below:

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2000/en/act/pub/0028/sec0081.html


The EU Copyright directive (EUCD) 2001/29/EC does give legal protection 
to technical copyright measures (basically, DMCA for Europe) but rights 
holders must allow usage which is consistent with existing copyright 
provisions in each member state (EUCD doesn't get into what these usages 
are, that's for the states to decide).

I don't know what the legal status of EUCD in Ireland is, I would 
imagine that since it was introduced in 2001 that it has been transposed 
into Irish law but I can't find a reference for it.

So, my (non informed) summary is that in Ireland, breaking copyright 
protection mechanisms is probably illegal but only if used for purposes 
that are not legal in the first place. If you're just playing DVDs, you 
should be fine.

  -phil




Gareth Eason wrote:
> Owen Brady wrote:
>> This was mentioned before on this list, but how does the use of libraries
>> such as libdvdcss/libdvdread
>> in ireland affect me?. Is it Illegal to actually read commercial dvd's using
>> libdvdcss and Mplayer for
>> example.