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No

Posted by J (A) on April 17, 2007 at 09:48:36

In Reply to: by your interpretation posted by tunenut on April 17, 2007 at 09:33:34:

First of all, it wasn't my interpretation, it was the interpretation of legal and computer security experts. I saw this posed in many places, not challenged, but perhaps poorly understood.

Disabling autoplay has nothing to do with it. If it was disabled, you still couldn't play the CD unless you agreed to the installation of the included player, which of course came with the malware that SonyBMG claimed was only copy protection.

The only person who did anything that was illegal, and only then in a strictly technical, legal sense, was Russinovich. Once declared malware by Microsoft, nobody was committing any illegal acts by doing anything to find, alter, or remove the rootkit, or to circumvent the copy protection as part of that process. Whether or not Russinovich would've been prosecuted--and of course we all know he didn't--doesn't change the fact that what he did was a violation of the DMCA.

And just because you see no worth in identifying the extremes of the law for what they are, doesn't mean that none exists: pointing to the fact that Russinovich's actions constituted a violation is exactly why we're able to make a determination that the law is absurd & needs an overhaul. Perhaps that case could be made anyway, but there are some who would disagree--the RIAA, for instance, who are on record, I do believe, as saying these types of copyright protections don't go far enough!

I won't argue that this is a relatively trivial point in the scheme of things, but I will say that being able to point to this as an example of exactly how extremely absurd the law is, is not insignificant in the debate, and the discussion that will hopefully lead to an overhaul of this legislation.

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