Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
There's no right to circumvent DRM even if making a copy would qualify as fair use under the copyright statute.
If you break DRM for "private gain or commercial advantage," you've committed a crime. If you do it otherwise, it's a civil offense with statutory damages of $200 to $2,500. (Or someone can sue for actual damages, assuming they could prove them.)
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If the DMCA is considered
on its own as the sole authority in this matter and all precedents to the contrary are ignored, then yes - that is absolutely correct.
However, remember that precedents are extremely powerful in US law. Since I am not a lawyer, I'll refer you to Xenophon's post
here - also see the link to his earlier post within that (both of these are very short posts). The essence of the problem is that the law is self-contradictory in the matter of claiming to respect existing fair use rights (in its preamble) but making a necessary step in this direction explicitly illegal (DRM removal).
Therefore, it is a matter for the courts to sort out and is not a cut and dried "this is illegal" kind of issue. It would be like having a law that says you have a right to buy liquor on Sundays while at the same time making leaving your house on Sundays illegal (the DRM thing is about as easy to enforce as this absurdity I made up). Lazy (or corrupt or merely incompetent) legislators who fail to see conflicts between laws cause such contradictions. All it takes is one politico with his snout too deep in the trough to get a law on the books that is incompatible with existing laws. A system that allows for contradictions in its basic legal structure is not a system that should be allowed to remain untested - that's where the courts come in. A law that no DA even
attempts to enforce is clearly not one that the legal system takes seriously.
Anyway, I don't think there's any reason for me to go on about the stupidity of these laws when all you were doing was pointing out a very valid factual point about it (which I fully agree with by the way, given the qualifications I made in my first line) - just know that until the contradictions are resolved (presumably by a lawsuit), we really don't know on which side a court of law will come down on - and in the end that case law is the one that takes precedence.
These are not laws of nature that they have unambiguous meanings independently of of existing case law.
And we're still waiting for much earlier "violations" of similar laws such as book-scanning, breaking MP3 drm and backing up computer software by breaking copy-protection on CDs (
for personal use without distribution) to make it to court. In some cases, the laws were fixed before this ever happened (software) and in other cases (like book-scanning), they were simply left unenforced because enforcing them would be massively silly. With the advent of DRM free mp3s,
that issue became a non-issue without ever being legally resolved in any way. Again, without distribution, no prosecutor has been foolish enough (yet) to attempt prosecution for any of these "violations".
I imagine ebook DRM removal will simply join things like book-scanning in the enormous heap of unenforced and/or unenforceable laws that no arm of law enforcement takes seriously - just think of all the
silly laws from old times that are still on the books. I don't see anyone exhorting their fellow citizens to follow those laws
just because they are laws and they must be followed.