A French court has ruled that DRM softwre preventing DVDs from being copied is illegal. A court of appeal decided that the use of the software banned owners from making copies of the products they had purchased for private use - and gave film firms a month to remove the crippleware from their discs.
The case came about after a man tried to copy the film, Mulholland Drive, onto a videotape so his mother could watch it - she didn't have a DVD player. The court ruled the men was within his rights to expect he would be able to copy the disc onto a tape and pass it on as it was not being resold.
The disk was labelled as copy-protected, but the court decided the label was too small to be useful. It sided with the French consumer body, the Union Fédérale des Consommateurs, against film firms Films Alain Sarde and Studio Canal in the case.
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