Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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You have just confessed to a federal felony under 17 U.S.C. section 1201, punishable by up to five years in prison. Breaking DRM, no matter how weak, is in and of itself a crime, separate from copyright infringement, unless it falls within one of the specific enumerated exceptions set forth by the Librarian of Congress, listed here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24...

> But now, how exactly do I get DRM-free movies while also paying for them?

"That's the neat thing -- you don't."

Part of the point of copyright is that the copyright owner solely determines whether and how their work gets distributed or exhibited. If they want to make it available exclusively through streaming, so be it. If they want never to release a movie again (see: Song of the South), so be it. You don't have the right to have your own copy of a movie, nor even to see it more than once. You can do these things only inasmuch as the copyright owners allow you to.

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...

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.

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

repealing them would require violating international treaties

Yeeeeah, about that...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Crimes against the terms and conditions

> the copyright owner solely determines whether and how their work gets distributed or exhibited

Legally, they do not. They can control the _first sale_ and no others.

I believe you're referring to the First Sale Doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 109)?

On a cursory search, I believe while you can resell, lend, or give away your copy, ripping it is problematic because you need to break the DRM involved, which explicitly goes against the DMCA (you'd be "accessing its content in an unauthorized way").

I didn't know the legal situation around the topic was this dire over there, I'm a bit surprised to be honest. I thought personal use was okay, but after an extensive discussion with my lawyer (gpt4o), seems to me that the parent comment is unfortunately correct.

I have the same lawyer. I don’t know if it’s true, but they said this:

> Want a workaround? Rip it on Linux. The DMCA applies to software made for circumvention, so some folks argue that Linux tools like libaacs just “don’t implement” the DRM, so they’re not technically circumventing—it’s a stretch, but that’s how VLC and others justify it.

I actually do run Linux everywhere, I don’t even own a Mac or Windows PC anymore. So maybe I would be covered, if I provided my own certificate file extracted from a blu-ray player or something.

I guess it's possible that holds, I'm not familiar with AACS enough. Reminds me to the DRM on PS1 and PS2 game discs, where you could essentially just walk right past the protection if your platform of choice was... PC. Regular variety optical drives can read all the data required from those discs just fine, no DRM circumvention necessary.

According to our lawyer, the "effectively controls access" bit in the DMCA is meant to be interpreted as whether it provides a "speedbump" or not, not in the sense whether there's a published method for cracking it, or if there are layman-accessible tools for doing so (unsure about the commonality of the practice aspect). But in the aforementioned case, there's no speedbump. The way that AACS idea is presented, it suggests to me that given the right circumstances this should be true for AACS as well, although I'd be surprised if that's a thing. I thought VLC and others rely on the keystores that ship with CPU microcode updates.

Edit: how long does ripping usually take for you? Maybe it's not a straight dumping process (where the AACS protection is actually circumvented) but a decrypt (using your CPU's keystores) and reencode? This would explain things pretty well. You'd also be magically in the legally green again :)

Edit #2: apparently not, not sure why I thought that CPU microcode was relevant here, apparently they don't ship keystores of any kind. Upon further interrogation, it just seems that the method of operation is different: libaacs will simply expect to be provided the decryption keys, and then how you got those keys becomes the problem (in the United States at least).

Does that mean that cracking DVD DRM is no longer illegal, because DeCSS exists and running it takes almost no time at all on modern computers?

No, you're interpreting "speedbump" too literally. Cracking CSS to access DVD content is still illegal in the US, because it serves as an additional step that you do in order to perform the access. That's the meaning I was going for, that it's a nuisance, something that gets in the way.

This is in contrast with my PS1/PS2 example, where a PC disc drive reads the disc as normal, and you access all the content needed from it as normal. The DRM scheme doesn't participate in the interaction whatsoever, it's inert (hence, ineffective).

According to what I've learned from gpt4o and the legal texts anyways (not a lawyer).

I see, thanks.

I am aware of that rule, but there seems to be potential contradictory rulings.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...

I don’t think it’s completely clear.

I suppose for legal reasons I should point out that I was of course speaking entirely hypothetically, if that was not obvious.

Just to clarify, we all have the right to the work. We just choose to grant author’s and businesses a time of exclusivity in owning it.

Mickey Mouse from 1928 is back in our hands. In whatever year Song of the South goes into public domain, Disney cannot stop its distribution.

Pedantic I know, but it’s important to remember that copyright isn’t an inalienable right. It’s one that we decided to give authors and then decided to give to businesses.

I’m not a lawyer so I can’t contest the legality of op’s actions, but I’m curious whether this state of affairs is one that you like personally?

I don't like it, but it is the law.

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