of emulators, or of copyrighted games/code?
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."
Also i think i was quoting an old version that has since expired. i guess https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-10-28/pdf/2024-2... is the current version maybe.
By making circumvention itself illegal the DMCA gives the producer to essentially invent new IP law.
Want to take a DVD you bought while vacationing in China and play it back home in the US. That is perfectly legal. However, if the DVD has even the flimsiest form of region locking, you would need to circumvent them, which is a crime.
As someone with lockpicks and practice locks, sure. But as soon as I pick someone else's lock without permission, it very much is a crime.
Right, but no one's installing a modchip on someone else's Switch without permission. No one's stealing Blu-rays to rip. I'd actually challenge you to find any DMCA anticircumvention claim where the people accused of violating it were doing things to hardware or media they didn't own or have permission from the owner to access.
The analogy is broken and doesn't apply.
The better analogy would be someone installing a lock on your property which you have the right to enter and use, and you going to jail for breaking the lock.
In real world, of course you can break someone's lock without permission when they put it on your property without getting your permission to do it.
And you buying property means the locks are no longer someone else's. They are yours to pick, cut off, melt, or throw into volcanoes.
If your landlord decides to put an extra lock on the unit you're renting, breaking that lock is not a crime.
It's a rental contract violation, maybe, depending on jurisdiction. Your landlord may try to charge you for the cost of the lock if you destroy it.
Picking the lock to get access to the property you are legally entitled to have access to is not a crime.
Circumventing a xor by xoring it back is still attempted circumvention.
Suppose you commit unambiguous copyright infringement. Then they could already sue you regardless of whether there is any circumvention and anti-circumvention is completely redundant. It has no actual purpose that exceeds what you would get from presuming willful infringement if someone had to circumvent copy protection and then having different penalties for willful and unintentional infringement.
But now suppose you don't commit copyright infringement. You make a fair use copy of the work. Completely different intent. They don't care. It's crazy.
Where this gets really wild is the prohibition on circumvention tools.
Suppose the copyright expires on a work previously under copyright. Happens all the time. You now have a bunch of works with a "technological protection measure" preventing you from copying them, even though they're not copyrighted. Your intent is now to publish a tool to help everyone remove the DRM from those public domain works. But maybe the same DRM is also used on other works that are still under copyright -- and you may not even know that. So does your intent matter or not?
And does the DMCA have even that as an intent requirement? Suppose you tell your local AI to copy something without even knowing that it has any DRM, and it does. Is that still a violation? Obvious loophole if it isn't, but intent requirement 100% fully absent if it is.
Anything can be a murder weapon too. Kitchen fork. Rubber ducky.