Quote:
Originally Posted by djrx
I agree. Removing any DRM, regardless of the reason, is a type of piracy. Whether you buy a paperback and scan it, buy an ebook to remove the DRM so you can use it on another platform, or remove DRM from KU to keep "forever", etc., in the eyes of the law, you're committing piracy.
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As long as we're talking legal terminology, removing DRM isn't piracy. Piracy is boarding followed by robbery and usually kidnapping and murder on ships at sea.
Indeed removing DRM isn't even copyright violation -- since you can remove it and then choose to *not* copy anything: it is common to remove DRM which is so broken it's preventing you enjoying the work you bought a license to at all. This is why the US added an *extra* crime in the DMCA of removing 'effective technical measures' preventing copying -- which then had to have copious carveouts punched into it because it turns out doing that prohibits people from doing a whole bunch of entirely legal things that they'd been doing for decades.
The carveouts are so badly designed and so temporary (needing frequent renewal) that this still causes actual suffering, the latest example being people stuck with implanted medical devices (preventing MRIs, etc) whose owning companies have gone bust but which often no longer work thanks to lack of upgrades, but which can neither be upgraded nor removed without DRM-breaking information the owning companies refuse to provide.
Terrible legal drafting under pressure from powerful interest groups does not make something morally or ethically wrong, but I'd say that people whose eyes no longer work and cannot be made to work because of laws passed to make stripping DRM illegal without concern for consequences *does* show that those laws are ethically and morally wrong.