Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Left open is what the law might say if they had actually identified an Abbey House customer who had followed the suggestion and was willing to testify they stripped DRM solely because of it.
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Not sure how that may have played out, it may have made for a more interesting case if it had been tested. She did mention they require "both knowledge of direct infringement and material assistance to the direct infringer"
I'm not sure how to interpret that really, is there an implied ordering in the statement? For example, if you know someone is an infringer and direct them to tools, I imagine that's contributory infringement. However, if as in this case, they had no reason to know/treat their customers as infringers at the time they directed them, would whether or not they later became infringers alter it to contributory infringement?
Either way, for the case as reported, I think the correct decision was made. The company was not encouraging people to use the tools and then upload/share and they had a valid use case for why the customers would need to remove DRM other than to infringe copyright.
As for the mention of calibre. They can use calibre to remove DRM albeit not without downloading an additional plugin that is nothing to do with the developers of calibre nor easily accessible from within calibre (unlike other plugins). Perhaps it's technically correct that you can use calibre to do so (after plugin installation) but only is the same sense you can use windows to remove DRM by installing calibre + a plugin
I think they've err'd in attributing it directly to calibre.