Are the French Going to Ban DRM Copy Protection?

By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews.com

Those Wacky French Dept: The Inquirer has been following a court case in France that has come to a very interesting conclusion. The case involves the copy protection schemes found on all DVD’s that are supposed to prevent pirates from copying them (yeah, right). Interestingly, while here in the States it’s legal to make fair-use copies of things like DVD’s and CD’s, it is technically illegal to “break” the copy protection (so how would one legally make a backup of a DVD, you might ask? Good question).

Anyway, the case was centered around a man who wanted to watch one of his DVD’s with his mother at her house. However, she did not have a DVD player to play it on. The French court ruled that the copy protection that prevented the DVD from being copied was actually illegal because it violated the right of the man to make personal copies of his DVD. On top of fines, the court gave the offending companies (Studio Canal and Les Films Alain Sarde) one month to remove the copy protection from their DVD’s.

I wonder what kind of effect this will have on the DVD market worldwide, since it would be very easy to import French DVD’s to any other country and copy them at will. I suspect there will be a large market for these new unprotected DVD’s. Keep in mind, though, that France is in Region 2 (Europe) so you can’t play DVD’s from France on most DVD players sold in the US. It is, however, very easy to find region-free firmwares for PC DVD drives and use software such as DVD Region Killer to make Windows believe that your drive is still protected. Source: The Inquirer via P2Pnet.net