Copyright law [LWN.net]

Copyright law

Posted Nov 12, 2020 22:55 UTC (Thu) by himi (subscriber, #340)
In reply to: Copyright law by ldearquer
Parent article: The RIAA, GitHub, and youtube-dl

There are lots of things you can get away with if no one realises you're doing them, and there are things you can get away with if no one cares because it has no impact on the rest of the world. The specific provisions of the DMCA (and the conventions that they implement) are targeted at cases where the vendor has tried to stop you from doing things via some technical mechanism, but you've worked around that restraint - it gives the technical mechanism implemented by the vendor the force of law, even if no one ever knows that you're doing it, let alone it having an impact on the rest of the world. You still have the protection of obscurity - if no one ever knows you did it they can't do anything about it. But if the technical mechanism you're circumventing includes a phone-home provision then you're screwed even then.

As the experience with CSS on DVDs demonstrates, it doesn't even have to be an effective mechanism, and it doesn't have to give any consideration to other parts of copyright law which might make it entirely legal to work around the mechanism - basically, they can take you to court and demand large sums of money (based on penalties intended to deter commercial pirates), and you then have to make a positive case to justify your particular personal use case.

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Copyright law

Posted Nov 13, 2020 2:56 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not quite as simple. RIAA can sue individuals who break CSS to watch DVDs. But it's likely to be tossed out with prejudice, since RIAA won't be able to show any damages.

What they _can_ do is suing the software publisher that created the tools to work around CSS.

Copyright law

Posted Nov 15, 2020 23:23 UTC (Sun) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link] (1 responses)

There were statutory damage rules involved somewhere that meant you could be liable for fines even if there was no evidence of actual harm - I can't recall if that was associated with the direct infringement or with contributory infringement, but it was definitely used to target people who were just seeding torrents, and I'm pretty sure there were cases early on where people had to invoke the first sale defence to avoid liability for breaking some of the dumb-arse CD copy protection schemes that existed. But one of the things that came out of the early court hearings on this stuff was case law that imposed more reasonable restrictions on liabilities if there was no commercial motive behind the infringement, which put a stop to a lot of the ridiculous behaviour by the record companies.

The current state of the law is quite significantly different to what it was back in the early 2000s, not because of amendments to the written law, but due to the build up of case law and precedent.

Copyright law

Posted Nov 16, 2020 8:39 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The key change AFAICT (and I'm not a lawyer, nor based in the USA, so take this with a pinch of salt) is that case law has established that you need to show that damage exists before you can choose between actual damages and statutory damages. Statutory damages exist in US law to cover the case where the actual damages are hard to establish (pirates don't keep the greatest records), and it was a stretch to have them cover cases where no actual damages existed.