Hacking DVD players - Legality and a little ATMB

[Princhester]

*Originally posted by Max Torque *
**A little info about the DMCA:

The DMCA makes it illegal to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected by this title.” They define “circumvent a technological measure” as “to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright holder.”

No doubt you’re now saying, “But region coding is easy to crack, so it isn’t very ‘effective’!” Ah, but hang on; the DMCA defines “effectively controls access” as “the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.” (bolding mine)

So, you may disagree, but it sounds to me like region coding is indeed a method that effectively controls access (it requires the application of information in the ordinary course of operation), and removing or altering the coding would be a forbidden act of “bypassing, removing, deactivating, or impairing” a technological measure that controls access.**

I will start with a few disclaimers. I am not a US lawyer, and I am not an IP lawyer. It is entirely possible that the legislation from which you quote has sections that you do not quote that will blow the opinion I am about to express out of the water, or that there are cases that interpret the legislation to the same effect. However, assuming that you have quoted all relevant parts of the legislation…

On the basis of your arguments above, playing a DVD inevitably involves “circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected by this title” in that the DVD player has to be one that is capable of decoding the region encoding.

The only real question, which you don’t discuss, is whether what you are doing is “without the authority of the copyright holder”?

It is bleedingly obvious that when a copyright holder (or at least their authorised distributor) sells me a Region 4 DVD I am authorised to play that DVD on a player capable of playing a Region 4 DVD.

End of argument. Questions of where I am when I play the DVD, or whether I have a DVD player or players capable of decrypting DVDs encrypted in other ways simply do not come into it.

[Fern_Forest]

The powers that be thought long and hard on my ATMB question I asked here, and here is their response.