Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
On what basis do you make this statement? In the absence of definitive court rulings, it would appear the DMCA makes it illegal.
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On the basis that I'm a US lawyer who knows how to read statutory law such as the DCMA and the case law and knows how to understand what they really say, as opposed to a layman who thinks that he knows what a law means merely by reading it.
It isn't easy to know how to read the law and understand it. There's an art to legal interpretation.
For an example of how a lawyer thinks about the law, read my post at
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...69#post1316169
I'm not going to say that you won't find a lawyer who disagrees with me, but I will say that I've been reading and interpreting statutory law for 40 years, and am pretty good at it by now.
And since most people are familiar with Sherlock Holmes, let me refer you to Silver Blaze, in which Holmes' deduction was based on something that did not happen. It's sometimes the situation in statutory interpretation that as much depends on what is not written as on what is written. And that's the situation with the DMCA. There's a big fat hole in it that would not be there if it was intended that stripping DRM from a file for personal use would be illegal.
But you have to have a legal education to see it, just like you have to be a doctor to interpret symptoms that a non-doctor might think he understands, but doesn't.
(As an interesting aside, the same kind of hole was in the Volstead Act (aka Prohibition) on which the DCMA seems to have been modeled. And I know this because I actually have read a legal treatise called Blakemore on Prohibition, 3rd Edition, published back before Repeal. It's astonishing how the DCMA tracks that that law - I have to believe that the authors of the DCMA must have done their research well no matter what I personally think of the damned thing.)