Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act only protects copyrighted material. Removing the "DRM" from non-copyrighted material can't (erm, should not?) be illegal, because there are no digital rights to protect.
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I agree with your sentiment, but the letter of law, as I understand it, is somewhat different. You see, the said act went a bit further, and defined a new type of criminal activity. From what I know, the design and distribution of
any tool that
can be used to circumvent copyright protection became a crime.
So, if company A, has
one copyrighted title protected by a given protection scheme, that makes the complete scheme legal fortress. Since the act
did not prevent company A from applying protection scheme on non-copyrighted material, it is
impossible to create a tool that will target
only non-copyrighted material, and will not work for copyrighted material offered by company A.