[wplug] OT: locked online music!?

[Chester R. Hosey]

Zachary Uram wrote:
> On 9/21/05, *Douglas Green* <diego96 at mac.com <mailto:diego96 at mac.com>>
> wrote:
> 
> Well said Douglas! I agree with you 100%. The Supreme Court has ruled on
> fair use and affirmed we have the right to make a private copy. These
> copy protections are illegal. I hope a case will be  brought before the
> Court on this matter soon.
> 
> Zach
> 

I'd disagree with that slightly. It's legal for you to make copies for
personal use, but I don't believe that it's illegal for Apple to make it
more difficult for you to make copies just because it would be legal for
you to do so.

They cannot bring action if you manage to make copies, although the DMCA
makes it illegal to circumvent access controls (which is illegal) in
order to exercise your fair-use rights (which is otherwise legal). While
Adobe vs. Sklyarov provides some indication that a jury might decide
that it's not illegal to produce means of circumvention which
significantly enhance fair use, it's been said that the legal outcome
was probably affected by the fact that Adobe couldn't provide a single
example of cracked content being distributed. Audio is significantly
different in that there's no question as to whether content is being
illegally traded online, something which circumvention software would
make significantly easier. As this is exactly the sort of activity which
the DMCA seeks to prevent, it would be much harder to convince a jury
that the infringing uses are insignificant against the benefits of
circumvention.

Ignoring the DMCA, reverse engineering is legal in many places. Despite
this it's not illegal to obfuscate generated code to make reverse
engineering more difficult.

I'd be quite interested if you could provide some evidence that it is
illegal to make it difficult for users to make copies.

Chet