3 ms·
But the fact that it's illegal has wider implications than the prosecution of the infringing person. For example, it becomes hard to distribute tools to remove
by Fargren 14y ago
But the fact that it's illegal has wider implications than the prosecution of the infringing person. For example, it becomes hard to distribute tools to remove DRM, should someone build them. Thus, it is unfeasible that DRM removal could become commonplace, since everyone has to do it for himself, or make a big effort to get help. There can't be legal commercial incentives to help people solve this problem, and even if someone made a free good tool for that, it would be legally attacked if it became popular; that means it probably won't be solved.
- shmerl 14y agoWho said those incentives should be commercial. They probably should make a point not to be. But practically this usually happens with placing the tools outside the jurisdiction of DMCA. For example repositories that host libdvdcss are located outside US, since the whole purpose of libdvdcss is to remove DRM from DVDs to enable playing them in open source players (which is naturally 100% fair use - i.e. to view the legally purchased content). And it is widely used - all Linux users basically use it to watch their DVDs. The level of "mainstream" penetration of such tools will depend on the level of DRM penetration. The more DRM will be pushed on people, the more commonplace the circumvention tools will become. In practice however the developing trend tends to be to use less DRM in various areas, so circumvention tools are kind of not very widespread either.