This is a good decision, but it's a depressingly incremental step toward a necessary change to laws that currently stand: No software should be illegal to modify for your own use on your own hardware by any means, period. Interpreting copyrights as covering software in this way is simply putting the state's muscle behind an entity besides the owner of a tool having control of the tool
> depressingly incremental step
Courts, by their nature, answer only the questions put to them to resolve a partifular case or controversy.
Would you say the same to be true about any book you might purchase?
I'm not seing the catch in this question. It'sbeen possible to tear out pages, write in the margins, underline things, etc. since books existed.
Precisely. People act like this DMCA anti-subversion nonsense is a necessary consequence of copyright as we know it, and that's fundamentally not true. Anti-subversion laws are a recent invention, were a horrible overreaction to some business models no longer being viable, and created the legal situation where merely using a device or a piece of software puts you, the end user, in a trap, where your autonomy is secondary to whatever business model the company that made it envisioned, enforced by the threat of ruin at the hands of the state. Now, I don't view IP in general as legitimate, but to say this nonsense the DMCA foisted on our legal system is a straightforward application of copyright as we knew it before is just ignorance, plain and simple