Can free e-books be pirated?

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Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Nobody has been found guilty of breaking DRM for personal use because nobody is being indicted for breaking DRM for personal use.

You can never be indicted for breaking DRM for personal use, because it's only a civil matter. Only supplying software/hardware to break DRM falls into the criminal.

And, that's exactly the reason nobody is being sued (or ever will be) for personally breaking DRM. It's the same category as copying a book you already own so you can mark up the copy with notes...fair use. Because of that, it's not possible to win an infringement case against personal DRM removal, because the amendment that added the "anti-circumvention" clause (commonly known as the DMCA) specifically included text that said that fair use still applied to the new prohibition against circumvention.

Since there are other types of infringement in 17 USC where fair use does not apply, so legislators could have left that part out of the DMCA, but chose not to. There has also been ample time to strike that part, but again, that hasn't happened.

So, regardless of the fact that courts haven't spoken directly on the matter, the law does, and the fact that not one of the giant lawsuit-happy copyright holders have even threatened anyone with a lawsuit over breaking DRM for personal use says that it's not infringement...it's fair use. In the US, at least.

Originally Posted by ApK

Please note the title of Public Law 105 - 147. So much for 'never.'

Titles of bills aren't important...it's what ends up in the code that matters, and the word "theft" is conspicuously absent from the text that ended up in 17 USC, but the added text uses "infringe" or variants several times. If legislators wanted to use the word "theft" in that section, they had ample opportunity, but instead chose to use the correct legal term: "infringement".

...and Copyright Office , and the FBI, and the legislators....and me (both a content creator and consumer), and likely a few million other folks.

You're really going to pull up talking points from people where the text was likely written by large copyright holders?

Like the titles of bills, it's again just incorrect usage of words in order to conflate two completely different types of acts, and it's all driven by the big copyright holders and their purchased influence on government.