Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Sorry, you may perhaps misunderstand me.
RealMedia had argued that people had a legal right to make personal backups of their DVDs, and that right justified the removal of the DRM. The judge ruled that there was no right to make a backup, and that therefore it fell foul of the DMCA. It's the "you don't have a legal right to make a backup" point that I was making.
You are, of course absolutely right in saying that the RealDVD lawsuit was a DMCA issue, not a copyright one, but I've seem people here argue that you have a right to make a backup of a book that you've bought, and the RealDVD ruling appears to throw some doubt on whether such a right exists.
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No, it doesn't. I'd have to do more work than is worth it to dig into that case, & explain to you why that's so.
But in a nutshell: [Edit: okay, I gave in & looked it up, as will be clear from my later posts.]
You have the right to make a backup copy, in the sense that you can't be punished for doing so. But you do not have the right, in the sense that you can do whatever you need to do in order to make that copy. You do not, for instance, have the right to buy DRM stripping tools, and no one has the right to make DRM stripping tools and sell them to you, or even give them to you. Your actual "right" boils down to "you can make a backup copy, but if making that backup involves acquiring a tool to strip DRM, you can't."
[Edit: after reading the opinion, I find that I was too conservative - the court is pretty clear that if you can manage to acquire the tool, you can go ahead & strip the DRM to accomplish fair use, even if the person who sold you the tool violated the law in selling it.]
So your "right" to make a backup cannot be relied upon by some commercial provider of backup tools to sell you a backup tool that strips DRM as part of the backup process.
[Edit: I'm pleased to find that this is exactly what the court said.]
And that's the context in which the judge's remark has to be understood.