Digital Bitch Slapping in New Orleans

Federal judge says you can break  DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyright

“ So this ruling is pretty interesting news, as it constitutes a circuit split with pretty much the rest of the nation's courts, which is often a precursor to a Supreme Court challenge. What's more, the defendants here are General Electric, not hackers in black t-shirts or sketchy offshore Xbox-modchip vendors (theoretically the law shouldn't care if the defendant is a hobo or a billionaire, but in practice, billionaires usually get better precedents, and not just because they can afford better lawyers).  (BoingBoing) ”

DRM (Digital Rights Management ), as codified in the US by the  Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the spawn of Hollywood money copulating with lawmakers.  This comment to the parent Boing Boing article nicely sums things up for us regular people, so hooray for that judge. “ Given the extremely restrictive DMCA wording, there are only two possible outcomes: 1) Nothing gets reproduced, ever, under any circumstances, even for promotion, except with the express payment of the promoter (in practice, promoters don't want to pay for every placement, and don't want trailers to be illegal) 2) Movie trailers become legally equivalent to pirating a whole movie, at which point everyone becomes a criminal, and ignores this silly law. (Anon) ”