French court bans DVD DRM

Keep it in the family

A French appeals court has ruled that movie companies must remove the copy protection from DVDs, and castigated them for inadequately labeling copy-protected movies.

The Paris court reversed an earlier ruling in favor of Le Studio Canal and Films Alain Sarde against consumer group UFC-Que Chosir, reports Afterdawn. The lobby group took up the case of a DVD owner who discovered he was unable to make a copy of the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive to play on a video recorder. This violated the basic rights the DVD owner had to make copies in a family context, the court ruled.

The court also ruled that the labeling was inadequate. A higher appeals court may yet overrule the decision, and rights holders may decide to invoke the European Copyright Directive in France, which outlaws machinery that enables such 'circumvention' of locked media.®

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