Opinion: the long stupid arm of the law

Posted on 27 Jan 2010 at 17:00

 

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Laws in the real world generally make sense. For example, everybody knows it's illegal to steal from a shop and the consequences of doing so. The law, in this case, is simple to understand and for police to enforce.

Take things digital, though, and the law suddenly becomes an incredibly stupid place where nobody's quite sure what's going, and it's damn near impossible to work out whether your actions are illegal or not, and if they are, why they are.

Take for example, DVDs or Blu-rays. There's software out there that strips out the copy protection from these movies. The upside of doing this means that region encoding protection isn't enforced and you can play high definition content over an unprotected digital connection, such as to a DVI monitor.

The benefits of this are huge: you can watch a disc that you've bought anywhere in the world on any display. Now, surely this is all fine if you don't actually copy the movie and hence aren't breaking copyright laws? Well, that's what we tried to find out once by phoning the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

FACT is the organisation that works on behalf of film and broadcast companies to reduce piracy. You probably know it better as the producer of the irritating adverts telling you that pirate DVDs are illegal and that downloading movies makes you as bad as Pol Pot (not to be confused with Paul Potts, the Britain's Got Talent winner). Now, we assumed that as FACT's job is to care about copyright it would know if it was illegal or not to break copy protection on a disc with the sole purpose of watching multi-region films. We were wrong. Nobody at FACT seemed to know, although we were mysteriously told that there was 'someone' in the office who knew the answer to the question.

In the end we found out the truth on our own: the UK has implemented the EU's copyright directive as the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003. These laws make it criminal offences of "manufacturing for sale or hire, importation, sale or distribution of devices or products which are primarily designed or adapted for the purposes of technological measures" and "providing, promoting, advertising or marketing a service the purpose of which is to enable or facilitate the circumvention of technical measures". In short then, you can't buy software that breaks copyright protection and we can't tell you about it.

So, if you buy a Blu-ray legally from the US and want to watch it in HD on your PC in this country, the software that would let you do this is illegal. Is this necessary? After all, copying a disc is illegal as it breaks copyright law; in the same way, scanning a book and putting it online is illegal, yet there are no laws banning scanners.

The really crazy thing is, according to FACT's website, is that "it is not an offence to buy pirated DVDs". Only the "production, distribution and sale of pirated DVDs is a criminal offence" - although, as anyone that's been in any supermarket car park in East London can tell you, the mass of far eastern pirate DVD salesmen are never troubled by the police and get away with the crime.

In summary, then: if you use software that gives you the freedom to watch any disc that you've legally paid for, you're breaking the law; if you buy a pirated DVD and watch this, you're not. Is it just me or should the law be more focussed in getting the pirate DVD salesmen off our streets and spend less time writing all-encompassing laws that prevent law-abiding PC users from watching films flexibly?

Author: David Ludlow