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17 USC is all about copyright. So, if somebody raises a lawsuit under chapter 12, it's a copyright lawsuit.
Yes, courts are all over the place about DRM removal, but it's pretty clear that since eBooks are allowed to be copyrighted¹, that means that removing DRM by itself creates a copy not authorized by the creator, thus it's also a violation of 17 US § 106(1).
Again, I'm not here making moral or ethical judgments...I'm just explaining what the US law says, as written. And, I know about various court rulings, but the #1 thing is that there has never been (and likely never will be) is a lawsuit about nothing but DRM removal. If that's all that happens, the copyright holders won't sue because they don't want to lose and set the precedent that "it's OK for personal use". You don't even see the manufacturers of DRM solutions raising the suits, either, even though you lawsuits of other reverse-engineering filed under 17 USC 1201.
¹According to the exact letter of the law, they might not be, since they aren't fixed in a material nor are they computer programs. Everything that is not a computer program that is streamed or downloaded falls into this hole of non-definition in the written law. It's only court decisions that have codified that these items have copyright protection, and there still hasn't been an umbrella USSC decision that unifies all districts in this. There has been a bit of an update to the definitions in section 101, but words that describe "storage on a computer" still aren't there.
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