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Post #1187154

Author
ElectricTriangle
Parent topic
Info Wanted: A question about public domain works...
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1187154/action/topic#1187154
Date created
24-Mar-2018, 1:21 AM

DMCA doesn’t exist outside of the US. Also, currently in the US there’s an exemption for breaking copy protection for the purposes of using the resulting footage for commentary and short usage, which is weird, since it judges your intent when breaking DRM (what if you decided not to use that footage in your documentary after ripping it?) and also doesn’t account for the fact that copy protected material might be in the public domain.

The question of what you do with the material after breaking the DRM is separate from the issue of breaking the DRM. In the early days of the DMCA, when companies actually tried to enforce the restriction on breaking it, I remember that legal decisions ruled that using the resulting footage for fair use purpose was legal, but breaking CSS wasn’t.

So theoretically you could be taken to court for breaking DRM, but the copy you made and distributed would be perfectly legal. God, copyright law sucks. In practice, I don’t think companies have gone to court over breaking disk DRM since the early days of HDDVD.

If you want a fun, legally dubious way around this, you could have a friend rip a copy in a foreign country and send you only the public domain content. Or torrent the movie as long as it didn’t come with any copyrighted bonus material or soundtracks.