Hi,
And this is the real issue.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wasgo
Also, it does prevent Canadians from from creating or providing instruction on DRM removal tools, but not much else.
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Without legal access to the "tools" how long do you think it will be before the major vendors change their drm schemes to make the current tools stop working.
I think people believe there will always be someone out there with the skills and interests to reverse engineer each new drm release. That may be true for more popular media formats like movies and cds, but it is not generally true for ebooks.
Except for a small hand full of people who supported such things, there has not been a mad rush of others generating drm removal tools for ebooks. And most of them have retired: IHeartCabbages, Dark Reverser, Alf, etc and that leaves fewer each year. And I know one more will retire if this bill passes into law (some_updates is Canadian based).
So you may be happy to say you will continue to remove ebook DRM for personal use but the tools to do that may simply not be available anymore even if they are free and pointedly against piracy like the AA site.
The few alternative sources for tools out there are just direct rip-offs (if you unpack them you see the exact same AA python scripts simply compiled to a binary for Windows - and not even compiled for Macs and they charge for it!) of what AA produces and so if AA goes away they will become useless as well.
IMHO, creation of "tools" should be protected activities (as long as you do not charge for them and do not promote piracy) so that users can continue to have fair use (fair dealing) access to them.
KevinH