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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, It's not questionable, there is no gray area. On the US it's a crime, almost everywhere else it's perfectly legal.

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The only two places I know that haven’t criminalised the circumvention of technical protection measures are Israel and Afghanistan. I’d love to be told different.

(I feel there’s still an opportunity to challenge DMCA 1201 in the US, and then there’s also the triennial review. It’s harder in places where the exemptions are hard-coded — but maybe you know of one that includes an exemption for this kind of DRM removal?).

It’s not quite as bad as that: according to the IIPA, “Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Norway, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as smaller markets, such as Bolivia, Brunei, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Namibia, Tanzania and Uganda” haven’t implemented it.

At least in terms of law as it's applied it's definitely not true. Either your sources are not correct, or "circumvention" is described very differently in other places.

Its explicitly legal to do this in New Zealand, for the purpose of shifting formats.

Wasn't DeCSS held legal in the US for purposes of playing back DVDs you've purchased? Shouldn't consuming e-books fall under the same ruling?

If I remember it correctly, CSS was deemed too weak for being considered copy protection. But I'm far from an expert. I'm not even from the US.

Actually, from skimming the linked white paper: https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-16-years-unde...

It looks like there's no way to watch DVDs legally with FOSS (still) in the US?

On the other hand the precedent for ebooks seem a bit better?

https://www.eff.org/es/press/archives/2008/04/21

No, it wasn't held legal. You can't play commercial dvds, blurays, etc. on vanilla fedora.

You’re right. It’s in the realm of not paying sales tax on stuff you buy out of state. No one keeps track of that shit but also it’s illegal to not do that.

I actually did do that until e-tailers started collecting state taxes.

It was very frustrating, from a civics perspective, to have to choose between obeying democratically enacted laws or being a chump.

As of a couple years ago, my state (Maine) added an option to calculate out-of-state taxes as a percentage of your income instead of tracking.

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