[AnthonyMouse]

Just to give you an idea of how dumb this law is, try this for a hypothetical.

Alice uses DRM to protect her copyrighted work.

Bob uses the exact same DRM to stop you from copying public domain works, for example.

You publish some code to break Bob's DRM. Is that illegal?

The law shouldn't enable Bob to do that. But if you can have tools to break Bob's DRM, the tools will break Alice's DRM because they're the same, and then the law is pointless and might as well be repealed.

But if it's not legal to break Bob's DRM, then obviously the law is ridiculous and needs to be repealed, if it isn't already unconstitutional as a result.

We should not still have this.

[GuB-42]

I don't think that a law preventing you from breaking Bob's DRM just because it protects public domain is ridiculous. Public domain just means that nobody owns the rights, it is not an obligation for anyone who owns a copy to make it available to everyone.

For example, I can own a copy of Moby Dick and do everything in my power to make sure that you don't get my copy, and if you break into my house to read it, I can sue you for that, and I don't think "but I wanted to read a public domain book" is going to be well received. What I can't do is prevent you from getting your own copy of Moby Dick from someone more willing to share it, and then share it yourself.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I don't think that a law preventing you from breaking Bob's DRM just because it protects public domain is ridiculous. Public domain just means that nobody owns the rights, it is not an obligation for anyone who owns a copy to make it available to everyone.

That's not what's happening. Bob is making it available to everyone, and then trying to reassert a copyright on something that isn't.

Suppose Bob was the copyright owner, last year, before the work entered the public domain. He never distributed any copy without DRM, so no DRM-free copies exist. This is fine? Section 1201 of the DMCA was created to eliminate the public domain?

You're also missing the point. Stop trying to argue about the specifics of the thing Bob is doing and just choose anything you feel would be illegitimate. Preventing the use of third party toner cartridges, preventing farmers from repairing their tractors, take your pick. That's obviously not what the law was intended to do and it shouldn't be doing that.

But when Bob is using the same DRM as Alice, either you can publish tools to break it or you can't. If you can, the law is pointless. If you can't, the law is wrong.

[rdmond]

> Suppose Bob was the copyright owner, last year, before the work entered the public domain. He never distributed any copy without DRM, so no DRM-free copies exist. This is fine? Section 1201 of the DMCA was created to eliminate the public domain?

No law compels Bob to provide people with new copies once the work enters public domain (and remember, Bob's publication might contain separate works with their own copyrights like cover art or an introduction). Once it does, Bob can't stop you from distributing a version you created by buying a print copy and scanning it or taking screenshots of his DRM version and running them through OCR (as long as you don't include the cover art or introduction). If Bob's DRM was unique to this one book, there might be an argument that breaking it was the same (as long as there's no cover art and no introduction). Since Bob's DRM is likely used for other works not in the public domain, it's going to be hard to distinguish your breaking it for this PD work from the fact that you've broken it for lots of other in-copyright things.

[AnthonyMouse]

> No law compels Bob to provide people with new copies once the work enters public domain

The problem is not what the law requires Bob to do. The problem is what the law prohibits you from doing.

> Once it does, Bob can't stop you from distributing a version you created by buying a print copy and scanning it or taking screenshots of his DRM version and running them through OCR

"The law against breaking DRM isn't wrong but only because it is actually useless."

> Since Bob's DRM is likely used for other works not in the public domain, it's going to be hard to distinguish your breaking it for this PD work from the fact that you've broken it for lots of other in-copyright things.

That's the problem. The tools don't discriminate, so banning them goes too far and prohibits more than it is reasonable to.

[rdmond]

> "The law against breaking DRM isn't wrong but only because it is actually useless."

No. Your right to distribute a copy doesn't imply your right to get one in the easiest way that you can imagine.

> That's the problem. The tools don't discriminate, so banning them goes too far and prohibits more than it is reasonable to.

Reasonable to whom? Someone else might say it's reasonable to protect the DRM on this PD book because it protects lots of in-copyright books without harming you because there are other ways of getting a copy of this one work without breaking the DRM on all of them. You might disagree but that's what courts are for.

The bigger problem with DRM exist because of concentration in the publishing industry. Licensing books sucks and that's what harms the public domain (and libraries), but there's not enough competition for many publishers to survive by offering to sell you the ebook rather than licensing it to you. Copyright isn't the enemy. It's the monopolies that abuse it.

[SSLy]

Public domain isn't copyleft.