Petteri Pyyny
17 Dec 2002 13:36
The European Union Copyright Directive, EU's own little clone of notorious DMCA law, should be implemented by European Union member countries into their existing legislation by 22nd of December, 2002 -- this upcoming Sunday. But now it seems that none of the countries is ready to do so in schedule.
According to various sources, the only country who might be able to implement the required changes into its existing legislation is Denmark. Other countries seem to miss the deadline -- some of them, such as United Kingdom, badly.
The EUCD, once implemented, basically makes it illegal to sell or distribute any device or software that makes it possible to circumvent a technical copy-protection mechanism. Good example of such tool is DeCSS which allows circumventing the CSS copy-protection found on DVD-Video discs.
Each member country can have their own little alternatives of the law, but basically most of the countries seem to adapt the worst possible methods for implementation. Only handful of countries, including Finland where AfterDawn.com is located, have allowed the use of such tools in their draft laws-- even though distributing is still illegal. Finnish draft of the new copyright law makes a mentionable exception -- it states that DVD region codes are not considered as "effective technical copy-protection" and allows region-free DVD players and tools that circumvent the region coding.
According to Finnish equivalent of EFF, called EFFi (Electronic Frontier Finland), the Finland's draft is currently "stuck" in parliament's committee and is not expected to be implemented before January -- it might even get delayed over the Finnish elections. In the UK, the law has been delayed as well and now the report in the UK Patent Office's pages says that the law should be implemented in the UK's legislation by 31st of March, 2003.
Once the law comes into effect in Finland, AfterDawn.com's DVD ripper selection will either disappear or to be limited to users outside EU only.
Source: AfterDawn.com