this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yupes.

Their trickery was to make the distribution of "circunvention software" the illegal part, so that common people would be unable to exercise their fair use "rights".

Per that Law "anybody" can legally exercise their "fair use" rights so long as they have the technical expertise to code themselves the software to do so since per the very same Law nobody can distribute said tools.

So the Law de facto makes it illegal for everybody but a fraction of a percent of people who know how to code that specific kind of thing to rip their own DVDs.

In practice the only way to exercise one's fair use "rights" is if somebody else has broken the Law and distributed a tool to allow those who do not have quite a rare set of expertises and lots of time in their hands to code their own tools, to exercise said "right".

This is one of the slimiest Tech-related Laws ever passed.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

My favourite: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

An illegal prime is an illegal number which is also prime. One of the earliest illegal prime numbers was generated in March 2001 by Phil Carmody. Its binary representation corresponds to a compressed version of the C source code of a computer program implementing the DeCSS decryption algorithm, which can be used by a computer to circumvent a DVD's copy protection.[14]