[nyx]

Felony contempt of business model! The DMCA and its anti-circumvention provisions bring us a rich history of abuse, including such gems as "Lexmark suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its ink cartridge business and thus give consumers more ink cartridge options" and "Chamberlain suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its garage door openers and thus give consumers more garage door remote options".

I admit I don't shed many tears for the poor movie publishers, but even setting piracy completely aside, these laws are anti-consumer garbage. One wonders aloud if there are limits to the insanity copyright owners are entitled to inflict on their customers. How about surreptitiously installing malware on people's machines to make sure they play nice?[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

[occz]

Crimes against the terms and conditions

[bitwize]

They may be anti-consumer garbage, but they're black-letter law, and repealing them would require violating international treaties. So they're not going anywhere.

[pessimizer]

Those are treaties that the US lobbied into existence, and can ignore out of existence. The reason they're not going anywhere is that the people who own the rights to everything want it that way, and pay people in government to keep it that way.

[account42]

It's like the local EU politicians saying they have no choice to implement an unpopular law due to EU regulations when their own party took part in getting those regulations passed in the first place. Always good to have a scape goat to avoid accountability.

[CamperBob2]

repealing them would require violating international treaties

Yeeeeah, about that...

[-__---____-ZXyw]

Hah. I chuckled at that too.

International treaties are de facto legally binding only for non-U.S. countries, surely we can all agree. The U.S. must be free to break any treaty whenever it sees fit, which is the price of being the leader of the free world... or something.

[immibis]

People break laws. "That's a law, therefore you can't break it" is a false statement.

[account42]

The right to self-determination cannot be given up in treaties.

[nyx]

whether this is a positive thing is left as an exercise to the reader :)