Re: It's legal to crack Apple II copy protection

[russotto@grace.speakeasy.net (Matthew Russotto)]

In article <bnuirp$2m9$1@acme.gcfn.org>,
Dave Althoff Jr <dalloff@gcfn.org> wrote:
>
>Because originally, the purpose of DeCSS was to provide a means of
>accessing data to which the author had every reason to believe he had a
>legal right to access...he bought the DVD, he owned the computer, he owned
>a DVD drive, and because he could not buy the software to play that disk
>on his computer, he wrote DeCSS to give himself access to the data.  The
>hardware in question was not obsolete, but it sure looks to me like it
>ought to be a non-infringing use!

It does not matter whether you have the legal right to access the
work.  You are forbidden to bypass the technological protection
regardless of the legality of the access itself.  That's part of what makes
the DMCA such a bad law.

The DVD-CSS organization has argued in court that you do NOT get the
right to access a DVD by purchasing the disk, but rather you must also
buy an DVD-CSS-approved player to get that right.  But I don't think
that point was ruled on by the court.

There's an interesting loophole in the law which, unfortunately, no
court would ever allow you to exploit.  To "circumvent a technological
protection measure" means to do so "without the authority of the
copyright holder".  So all you need to do is get one copyright holder
to explicitly permit you to decrypt a work protected by, e.g.,
CSS, and you can (by the letter of the law) build and sell a tool to
unscramble that particular work.  If it happens to decrypt other
works too... well, as long as you don't market it as doing so, it's
not a circumvention tool as defined by the act.

However, no court is ever going to buy this argument.
-- 
Matthew T. Russotto                            mrussotto@speakeasy.net
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit
of justice is no virtue."  But extreme restriction of liberty in pursuit of 
a modicum of security is a very expensive vice.