Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's not entirely true, is it? I'm sure you'll recall that a few years ago the company who makes "RealPlayer" were taken to court over a program that bypassed the DRM on DVDs, and were prohibited from selling it. The judge in the case ruled that the right to make a backup of media such as DVDs does not grant the right to remove DRM in order to do so.
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Not exactly. I think you mean RealNetworks case in 2009. RealNetworks was sued for breach of licensing (they were licensing CSS) rather than violation of DCMA. The big issue that RealNetworks faced was the judge found that they had engaged in evidence destruction.
The other major case was the DeCSS case in 2000. In that case, the judges ducked the question of DCMA by making a narrow ruling that the defendants had not claimed to be engaged in fair use but rather that it violated their 1st amendment rights to free speech. In their ruling, they hinted that they actually agreed with the defendant, but he argued the case on the wrong grounds (free speech rather than fair use). The meaningfulness of the case is shown by the fact that you can still download DeCSS and DVD rippers are widely sold by main stream companies.
One of the oddities of the US appeals system is that court cases are frequently decided on very narrow technical questions that avoid the broad question that is being raised.
So far, the question of fair use allowing the overriding of DRM hasn't actually been heard in court.