Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
As I wrote over in another thread (here):
It seems worth repeating the above.
That said, Harmon appears to fall into a fourth camp (the "clearly legal" group). I've heard a bunch of eminent legal experts take that position, but as a non-lawyer I do not trust my notes to correctly represent their arguments -- which is why I have not attempted to present any of those arguments here. Harmon's analysis doesn't look like any of what I see in the notes I took in the IP seminar I attended, but who knows whether that means anything or not.
Anyway, I can assure you (and especially HarryT) that there are plenty of lawyers who specialize in U.S. IP Law who agree with Harmon's conclusion. And plenty of others who don't. Go figure! 
Xenophon |
I expect that the "clearly legal" group is composed of a bunch of people with a lot of different reasons why they reached their conclusions.
I've limited my position to what I see as the clear requirements of the statute for a criminal prosecution to be successful.
Having said that, there seems to me to be a fundamental conflict between the DCMA and the First Amendment. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point, some court declares the the whole damn thing to be unconstitutional. But that's an entirely different argument for "clearly legal," and would take me a whole lot more time to work through and understand, even assuming that my gut reaction is correct, which it might not be.
But a more likely outcome is not a legal one, so I can't claim any special understanding. I just think that it is likely that DRM will become irrelevant, either because it becomes increasingly impossible, technologically, to enforce, or more likely, because market forces will eliminate it.