[ILUG] Legality of commercial DVD playback.

[Rory Browne]

2009/1/20 Phil Bradley <philb at vodafone.ie>

>
> 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


Hmm - that section, specificly refers to (a) adapting a program, and (b) to
achieve interoperability with _other_programs_.

Cracking DVD encryption, doesn't seem to match either of these criteria.

To me this article suggests that it would be legal to take a windows DVD
decoder library, convert it into an ELF-binary .so file ( along with libwine
), and copy that, regardless of the licence of the original windows .dll
file.



> 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.
>

http://www.entemp.ie/publications/sis/2004/si16.pdf


>
> 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.
>
>