A European copyright directive that prohibits publishing information that could enable illegal DVD copying is being questioned by the Finnish courts.

A Helsinki District Court judges threw out a case against two men charged with violating copyright law for distributing code that broke the copy-protection technology on DVDs.

The EU directive prohibits the promotion or creation of tools to circumvent technologies designed to protect copyright as long as that technology "achieves the protection objective."

The court decided that that the CSS (content scrambling system), a form of DRM (digital rights management) to prevent illegal copying was too ineffective to achieve any standard of protection. This means that it cannot be protected by law.