Originally posted by: RampantAndroid
Originally posted by: Matthias99
Originally posted by: LikeLinus
Actually what you are doing is illegal. Breaking the copy protection and ripping the disc isn't legal
There are some questions as to whether these provisions of the DMCA would actually hold up in court, but technically, yes, it is illegal to break encryption in the US right now, even if you do not do anything illegal with the content once you have it in an unencrypted format.
As far as the OP: Trolling/flaming or threadcrapping is still not allowed, even if the person you are doing it to is doing things you don't like or that are illegal. If you feel someone is doing things that violate forum rules, report them to a moderator or post about it in FI.
Aren't there 2 laws that contradict eachother (millenium rights act being 1) where one says, you bought it, do what you want, and the other says you cannot touch encryption??
Note: IANAL, and I am paraphrasing things very heavily. This thread should not be considered legal advice, and will not hold up in court. Copyright law is EXTREMELY complicated.
The DMCA, basically (among many other things), makes it illegal to create, distribute, or use software that can be used to defeat cryptosystems. This should, technically, make things like DeCSS illegal. However, these provisions have not been tested in court.
Copyright holders have the right to define what you are and are not allowed to do with their content -- to a point.
'Fair use' provisions under copyright law say that (among other things), if you have a right to view certain content, you should be able to view it as you see fit, and do other things that don't impact the copyright holder's rights or take money away from them. For instance, it's perfectly legal for you to take a bunch of CDs you own and make a compilation tape to listen to (or to rip the CDs to your computer and listen to them yourself). But it's not legal for you to give the tape to your friend, or make the files available for download online, or to open a CD rental service and charge people to listen to your CD collection.
With modern computer technology, it is now possible to make lossless digital copies of audio CDs or DVD movies -- something that really was not possible with analog media distribution. Pirated copies of content used to be lower in quality, and second- or third-generation copies were significantly degraded. This is no longer the case, which has driven content providers to use stronger copy-protection controls on digital content.
The problem is that some things that people should reasonably be able to do via 'fair use' are often restricted by DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies like CSS in order to make digital piracy harder. For instance, some people would like to be able to rip DVDs to their hard drive so as to be able to watch them without having the physical DVD in the drive -- this seems to be a fine thing under fair use, but currently letting people do this would also let them make unlimited copies of the DVD and pirate it. So DVDs have CSS encryption, which prevents you from ripping/copying the DVD on any compliant DVD player/software.
This is a VERY complicated issue, and it starts to bring out many of the flaws and limitations of current copyright laws (which were mostly written decades or even centuries ago, without taking into account that people would be able to very quickly and cheaply make very high-quality copies of content).
The question is not whether you should be able to distribute content without permission. The question is how much the content providers are allowed to limit 'fair use' in order to prevent easy piracy. And there is no clear-cut answer here.