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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

> Even telling someone how to break a lock is illegal. Even learning how to break a lock is illegal.

Source? I wouldn't have thought a US law saying these things would be allowed.

The typical area where this comes up is 17 USC 1201(a)(2); "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that" [breaks DRM]. "Otherwise traffic" is a big universe of actions, as is "offer to the public."

The courts that handled the DeCSS cases (code that broke DVD encryption) allowed that code like DeCSS was speech protected by the First Amendment, but basically ruled that the functional aspect of the code meant it gets lesser protection. Posting the code, but even just linking to somewhere else it could be found, were both found to violate the DMCA, and that restriction was found to be permitted by the First Amendment.

Exact source is a bit convoluted, because most US law is convoluted, but is covered in multiple subsections of section 1201 of Public Law 105–304 (the technical name for DMCA). There are exceptions for things like making things interoperable and security research (kinda), but beyond that simply glancing at one of these locks can be a violation of DMCA. Sadly the document is excessivly long (60 pages plus references to other laws), and the available source PDF is so poorly formatted as to be nearly impossible to follow (nothing is aligned correctly, and subsections regularly form a very confusing pattern)

Yeah, you'd think so, but alas principle still has an uphill battle against profit and power.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-appeals-court-ru...

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