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Originally Posted by edembowski
Not only is this not true, there is no case law to support your position.
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There doesn't need to be case law. It's illegal. Case law certainly could change that, but because there hasn't been any case law, it's still illegal.
I don't expect to see any case law on DMCA circumvention of legally obtained material for personal use. There doesn't seem to be any interest in suing paying customers over such things. But that doesn't make it legal. I
did say that I was being
pedantic.
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the DMCA has specific clauses allowing the reverse engineering of electronic controls for the sake of interoperability. It is perfectly legal to remove DRM on your content
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This is patently false. Please refer to the DMCA,
17 USC 1201. The statutory exceptions are in subsections (d) through (j):
- (d) Exemption for Nonprofit Libraries, Archives, and Educational Institutions
- (e) Law Enforcement, Intelligence, and Other Government Activities
- (f) Reverse Engineering
- (g) Encryption Research
- (h) Exceptions Regarding Minors
- (i) Protection of Personally Identifying Information
- (j) Security Testing
Subsection (f) is the only mention of "interoperability", and it's only applicable to computer programs, not to e-books. Subsection (f)(4) notes, "the term “interoperability” means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged."
Additional exceptions
established by the Librarian of Congress under subsection (a)(1)(c) provide for "jailbreaking" of "computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications" for interoperability (exception #2), but not for any other case.
Stripping DRM from e-books that you've legally obtained, for the purpose of reading those e-books, currently is illegal in the US (except as provided by the Librarian of Congress's exception #6) whether anyone ever gets sued for it or not.