Thursday 22 March 2012

Accidentally or manually breaking the DMCA

I wonder, does copying out the contents of a copy-protected PDF by hand constitute a breach of the DMCA? Also, taking photographs of an on-screen document doesn't trigger any copy protection software at all, and requires no special equipment. Technically, it is circumventing a digital lock, but if that's what you were going to do anyway, how would you know the lock was there in the first place? And if the lock fails somehow, you might be able to make a copy in a perfectly ordinary way without triggering it, and again you wouldn't know you had done anything wrong. So what, according to DMCA, actually constitutes circumventing a digital lock, if it might be possible to do so without any intention of bypassing copy protection?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Ignorance is usually no defence.
PPS - So they tell me.

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