There's an interesting story
here at Ars Technica about a proposal to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "
DMCA") in the U.S. to allow a person to break a digital lock on a piece of media if they're not doing so to facilitate copyright infringement. The example in the article of something that this amendment would make legal is ripping DVDs for personal use, but another obvious example is removing DRM from an eBook for personal use.
For those unaware of the issue, the DMCA provides that:
Quote:
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No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title...
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The effect of the above is to make it illegal to remove DRM from a movie, eBook or piece of software that a person has legally bought, whether or not they would otherwise be permitted to do so under copyright law. The provision has been used in a lawsuit against a magazine, to make threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten's team of researchers, and as part of a prosecution of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov.
I'm not American, but I find the proposed amendment very interesting as Canada adopted somewhat similar anti-circumvention rules in its Copyright Act due to pressure from the U.S.