Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Most of the rest of your post(s) I have provided my opinion of in one way or another already ... but the DMCA stuff: I think you are reading way more into that act (as relates to your benefit) than actually exists at this time.
According to Wikipedia (I have not read the original), the DMCA "also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself." There are however exemptions, but these may change every three years. I would not look to the DMCA for "protection" in this instance - actual cases gone to court may offer you better hope. If you have links to more up-to-date detail or interpretation than offered by Wikipedia then I would be grateful if you shared.
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My interpretation is based on the source material: I've read the act. There is simply not any section of the act which makes the stripping of DRM
by itself a criminal or civil violation. There has to be some additional factor involved. The section that Wikipedia is talking about in your citation is one which starts with the premise that the "additional factor" is present.
One such additional factor is "distribution." So if I strip DRM and start handing out copies of the stripped file to my friends, that's probably a violation. But what if I'm a college professor handing out extracts of a stripped book to students?Is that "distribution?" Probably not, but what professor wants to risk a lawsuit over it? He might lose.
So what that section of the act does is let the Librarian of Congress decide the issue, rather than have the issue resolved by litigation. Essentially, the Librarian can create what lawyers call a "safe harbor" for situations where there might be some dispute about the extent to which the act collides with the doctrine of "fair use."
It's a frustrating situation, because any lawyer who reads the act is going to tell his client that there's no money nor chance for success in trying to sue, or get the US Attorney to prosecute, someone who buys an ebook and strips the DRM in order to device-shift, or merely to insure that when the seller withdraws device support, the functionality of the ebook is not lost. And no law student is going to waste his time writing a law review note on the point - there's no intellectual meat there to justify it. As a consequence, there's just not going to be a definitive answer written up anywhere beyond a post on an obscure ebook blog.
So people with no legal training read the sort of thing you point to on Wikipedia, and draw an understandable but erroneous conclusion about what it means because they don't grasp the underlying context, and do not know how to read the statute.
The DMCA was not overtly intended to change copyright law. Covertly, though, the lobbyists knew that what it would do is create a legal environment where the corporations can intimidate people into not exercising their fair use rights, because the bottom line is that while the law won't punish you, the litigation will - even if you are right. That is what is deeply wrong with this act.
But putting aside that point, I stand by what I said - the act was written in a fashion that intentionally did not make the mere act of stripping DRM wrong. It is not legally wrong, and certainly not morally wrong.
(As an aside, I would love to see a simple amendment to the act which would say that any entity attempting to enforce the act and losing in court has to pay the defendant's legal fees, and a fine equal to twice those fees. That might bring some balance back into the law.)