the DMCA illegalizes certain activities regarding digital media. unfortunately, the specifics of such are left rather open, meaning until the courts get involved its current illegal to do things with digital media that are fully legal with analog and print media.
in particular, reverse engineering for the purposes of breaking anti-copy protection is illegal, even if your purpose for copying (making a backup copy for your own use) is fully legal under your fair rights laws.
its the reason many dvd-copy programs have been made illegal and those companys are now out of business because they couldn't afford the lawsuit to get this crap thrown out as unconstitutional.
similarly, its the reason its technically illegal to write open-source programs that can read windows media or itunes files (or quicktime, or ...).
its the reason that a PC dvd-rom player can not legally be made to be "all-region", but restricts itself to your own region after a fixed number of uses.
there are even more restictions embedded in this document, all of which were unnecessary because ordinary copyright law was clear enough on these issues except for where the anti-copy protection racket got involved. rather than work with the growing digital global market, they opted to go straight to congress through lobbying and bypass the needs of their customers.
they then started the trend of lawsuits that you can read about pretty much weekly.
assuming your customers are criminals before they've even bought your product is no way to run a business.
Diebold is the first company to be held liable for violating section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it unlawful to use DMCA takedown threats when the copyright holder knows that infringement has not actually occurred.
Re: DMCA
in particular, reverse engineering for the purposes of breaking anti-copy protection is illegal, even if your purpose for copying (making a backup copy for your own use) is fully legal under your fair rights laws.
its the reason many dvd-copy programs have been made illegal and those companys are now out of business because they couldn't afford the lawsuit to get this crap thrown out as unconstitutional.
similarly, its the reason its technically illegal to write open-source programs that can read windows media or itunes files (or quicktime, or ...).
its the reason that a PC dvd-rom player can not legally be made to be "all-region", but restricts itself to your own region after a fixed number of uses.
there are even more restictions embedded in this document, all of which were unnecessary because ordinary copyright law was clear enough on these issues except for where the anti-copy protection racket got involved. rather than work with the growing digital global market, they opted to go straight to congress through lobbying and bypass the needs of their customers.
they then started the trend of lawsuits that you can read about pretty much weekly.
assuming your customers are criminals before they've even bought your product is no way to run a business.
Re: DMCA
Diebold is the first company to be held liable for violating section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it unlawful to use DMCA takedown threats when the copyright holder knows that infringement has not actually occurred.