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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

How can that be possible? What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it? How can bypassing DRM even be illegal? If someone owns their hardware then you can do any hardware or software modifications you want to it.

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You may want to support the EFF in their challenge to this law: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-appeals-court-ru...

The difference I think is that the lock on your front door is on your front door. Whereas I think even if there's no other copyright violation, it's still illegal to break DRM.

Picking the lock involves trespassing your property. Breaking the DRM is illegal regardless of if it's trespassing on anyone's property.

Regardless of the merit of the rest of the argument, the quality of the DRM doesn't really matter for the same reason the quality of the lock of my front door doesn't matter. Most locks are shit that can be picked by a toddler in a minute. Their goal is mostly to make sure that if you open the door, you meant to.

I believe the wording used is "effective technological protection measure". So it's presumably up to the courts to decide whether the DRM was "effective" in the first place. (I am not a lawyer etc. etc.). I suspect it largely comes down to intent. To make an analogy, you'd still be on the hook for breaking-and-entering, even if your victim's front door was made of cardboard.

> How can bypassing DRM even be illegal?

Same way anything else can be illegal, they made a law saying so.

The law includes a definition of that term

>a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

So bypassing trivial DRM is still a crime.

Iirc there is case precedence for Adobe successfully invoking the DMCA with a ROT13 protection system. That’s the software equivalence off a child’s decoder ring and can be done in BASH built in (`tr`)

Because the law is absurd, unconstitutional, immoral and harmful. Nonetheless, it's still enforced.

> Because the law is [..] unconstitutional

I agree with you on all the other bits, but I'm curious as to why you believe it's unconstitutional. Not trolling here; I don't think I've heard constitutionality arguments against the DMCA, and I'm curious if there's something there.

Not GP, but I assume they mean that publishing DRM circumvention tools is or should be protected expression/speech (as is publishing any other type of software or code).

PS: thanks djb (c.f. Bernstein v USA)

The main way in which DMCA 1201 is unconstitutional is that it violates the first amendment. The EFF is litigating a case to this effect right now.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's one big proponent against copyright overreach is leaving the court soon.

I get your incredulity, but that's the law as it stands now.

> If someone owns their hardware then you can do any hardware or software modifications you want to it.

In practice, this isn't something you'd get in trouble for. But if you were to distribute tools and how-tos to help others modify their hardware, that's the bit that really gets you in trouble. I believe there's a carve-out for tools that have significant non-infringing uses, but I'm not sure how well that defense usually holds up.

But yeah, overall it's stupid, and disgusting that this has been the law of the land for over two decades now.

Under the anticircumvention clause of the DMCA, if I xor every 7th byte of 8 byte blocks with the value in the 8th, and you figure that out, and then wrote a program that (un)did the xor, you'd be in violation of the DMCA.

Doesn't matter outside of that, the law is poorly written, any means or attempt to break the circumvention is a violation.

> What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it?

That was exactly the case with YouTube's DRM (video URL is encrypted with a key that is embedded in the javascript for the web page) and was the basis for the takedown against youtube-dl. I am not sure what the court would rule, because in that case everyone from GitHub to Google told the RIAA to pound sand and people didn't get sued.

"What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it?"

Any damages would be eaten up by lawyer's fees. The legal fees are (arguably?) worth it to protect a whole system's games from being freely available but the lawsuit itself would not be profitable.

Don't plaintiffs usually also sue to recover attorney/court fees from the defendant if they win? And that usually is granted?

Almost none of the plaintiffs would ever pay. Like this case, Nintendo is supposed to get ~5 times the amount of money they claim he made. How would he ever pay that, more so while in prison?

> "What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it?"

Sklyarov was taken to court, and ~I believe is still in jail~, for bypassing Adobe's use of the amazingly secure ROT13 cypher.

EDIT: Charges were dropped a year later, because of the insanity of charging someone for using such an insecure mechanism. But only after both the EFF and Adobe came out in support of Sklyarov.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/dimitry-sklyarov-enemy-or-frie...

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