Is it legal – or moral – removal of DRM?

All you think on Digital Rights Management Software, difficult to argue with the fact that it is annoying. There is such technology, in theory, to protect the intellectual property of companies that create music, movies and games, but it can also hinder you to enjoy books, music and videos the way you want.

Say, for example, you bought a collection of books on Amazon Kindle A platform but later decided that you want to switch to the Kobo (or vice versa). DRM systems are designed on both systems to prevent you from deporting your books from one platform to another, which means that you may need to pay only again to read a book on Kobo, which you already paid on Kindle.

The program can remove this DRM. It takes some research and jumping through some technical hoops, but it may save you from having to buy the same media for the second time. But is it legal?

Illegal, but it is unlikely to be imposed

Let’s carry out active aid: the act of removing DRM of any kind of public copyright work on a large scale in the United States below Article 1201 of address 17, United States LawWhich was issued with the Copyright Law of Digital Millennium in 1998.

The rule is clearly written: “No one may circumvent a technological scale that effectively controls access to protected work under this title.”

I asked for that Derek BambuerProfessor of Law at the university or Florida specializing in the law of Internet, cyber security and intellectual property, whether there are any exceptions for this. Bambauer tells me that there is little legal ambiguity here.

“The exceptions are there, but they are really narrow,” he says, stressing that the first amendment arguments do not tend to work regarding intellectual property.

But will you remove DRM from a file you paid for you to prison or prosecute? Maybe not.

“We are all violating the copyright constantly,” he says, noting that the comic strips that are copied at the door of his office are a technical violation. Through limited resources, simple intellectual property owners cannot sue everyone. “Companies tend to follow people who distribute copyrights with others.”

“If the DRM removal is only for personal consumption, it is difficult to discover,” says Bambauer. One, I tried to make music this, and it was a terrible failure. And two, much easier to follow creators and distributors of tools. “

This is what companies do: an attempt to close or prevent the distribution of programs that remove DRM from files. This is the reason why most of these programs are tended by people outside the United States and are distributed on web sites outside the United States. He also emphasized that sharing files with others after removing DRM is likely to attract lawsuits from companies.