Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The poster who was talking about removing DRM, though, is in the Netherlands, so the DMCA is irrelevant. I don't know about Dutch law in particular, but I don't know of any EU country in which DRM removal for personal use is illegal.
In the US, a number of legal authorities have expressed the view that DRM removal is not illegal, because the Fair Use clause of copyright law "trumps" the DMCA but, until a case goes to court, both the "it's illegal" and "it's not illegal" camps are merely expressing an opinion.
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That's partially true, but actually in the U.S. the anti-circumvention section of the DMCA has been used to, among other things, stop certain computer research. In 2001, a programmer was jailed for a few weeks after speaking at a conference. The programmer wasn't accused of infringing copyright, merely working on software tools that could be used to break DRM. The anti-circumvention section has also been used in lawsuits to stifle competition.
The point is the language in the DMCA has real world consequences in the U.S., it's not just some interesting puffery for academics to argue about.