Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It is very probably a crime under the DMCA for people in the United States to do so.
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Nope, definitely not a crime. Nor civil liability, if all you do is strip DRM. Roughly speaking, where you get in trouble is if you distribute the stripped ebook for commercial advantage or financial gain (crime), or in violation of copyright (damages) or if you distribute anti-DRM programs, which I
think follows the same pattern.
I've been poking around in the DMCA, and my sense of the matter is that the Act is not aimed at the individual reader who strips the DRM for purposes of reading a book he has paid for. I'm pretty sure that if you are competent enough to put together your own DRM stripping program, and use it entirely for your own personal use on your own computer or reader, you will not be liable for either criminal or civil penalties.
And having said that, I also think that if someone gives you or even sells you a program to strip the DRM, you still won't have a problem, although the person who gives or sells it to you could, particularly if it's a sale.
This interpretation is reinforced for me by the following statement in a Wikipedia article on the DMCA:
The arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov in 2001, for alleged infringement of the DMCA, was a highly publicized example of the law's use to prevent or penalize development of anti-DRM measures.[12] While working for Elcomsoft in Russia, he developed The Advanced eBook Processor, a software application allowing users to strip usage restriction information from restricted e-books, an activity legal in both Russia and the United States.[13] Paradoxically, under the DMCA, it is not legal in the United States to provide such a tool.
The problem with the DMCA, from our perspective as consumers, is that it makes us think that we can't do things that we really can, in no small part because we don't really know our rights, but we do know what the costs of defending those rights are.
If I run across a DRM stripping program that works on a mac, I won't have any concerns about using it to make any book I buy readable on my 505. As far as I can tell, there's nothing (yet) to legally prevent you from doing whatever you want to make your own ebook readable on your own computer.