Quote:
Originally Posted by vaughnmr
You need to go back and re-read the law (DMCA) again. It does criminalize the act of removing digital locks in the US.
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Are you a US lawyer? I am, and I've read the DMCA. Yeah, yeah, it's the argument from authority, but unless you know how to read a statute, it is easy to misunderstand what it really says - or doesn't say. The DMCA doesn't criminalize the act of removing digital locks on files which the person doing the removing owns. If I am in legal possession of a locked file, I can unlock it, scramble it, serve it up on Toast, whatever I want to do, except distribute it.
What the DMCA criminalizes is
selling or distributing the tools which can be used to remove the locks. And IIRC (it's been some time since I went to the trouble of analyzing it) it also criminalizes unlocking a file & distributing it to others for commercial purposes. Anyway, if I can get someone to sell/give me the tools, they might be in trouble, but I'm not, except on some attenuated conspiracy theory which no prosecutor in his right mind would take to a jury. And if I'm knowledgeable enough to whip up the right tools by myself, I'm home, totally free. I can take the Amazon file, unlock it, reformat it to epub, move it to my Sony, and wave it under Jeff Bezos' nose. He'll just have to live with it.
If you think otherwise, please post the provisions of the DCMA that you think say so.
(My analogy to Prohibition is not just for fun. It's really quite interesting, at least to a lawyer, to find that the DMCA is constructed in the same fashion as the Volstead Act.)