Not sure why you're downvoted. I don't know that your statement is 100% accurate, but it's not far off the mark, either.
The law in the US is such that a high-profile site that does business in the USA, like SO, is entirely reasonable if it wants to to err on the side of caution on these things. Not all the questions around the DMCA have been settled by the courts, so, no, we can't necessarily say for sure what is legal and illegal. But we can say that volunteering to help everyone to figure this out could be a very expensive proposition.
Actually in the case of breaking DRM potentially in violation of the DMCA, they have relaxed things a bit[1].
I do remember that they would delete any discussion of cracking DRM.
But my bigger point is that they essentially act as toadies when they are not obligated to. I think it is actually worse when they try to act as enforcement agents of behalf of terms of service for corporations that they have no relationship with.
And there is no moral context considered. What if a Saudi woman being held hostage wanted technical information to escape and seek refuge in another country, but doing so violated some company's TOS? I am certain that SO would side against the woman, because of their narrow and sycophantic attitude.
For example, I was enrolled in the Meego developer program in 2011, and was given a free Exo Tab tablet from Intel. When the project was canceled, I was supposed to destroy the tablet after one year. Intel technically retained ownership of the tablets on paper, so that developers would not have to pay taxes on them.
So, I posted, asking to find out how I could get the specialized drivers and interface software for Windows 7 on the device. But the mods decided that they should act as agents on behalf of Intel and the US Internal Revenue Service, even though nobody else cared.
I asked a simple technical question about where I could hypothetically get software for hardware I was in possession of.
A representative from Intel assured me that Intel had no plans to enforce this agreement, and it was merely on paper so that we did not have to pay taxes. Additionally, I seriously doubt that the IRS would want to track me down and fine me for not paying taxes on the $700 tablet I received. And the development program was canceled anyway, so why not put it to other use? And how do they know I was not going to honor my agreement and destroy it anyway??
But no, the toadies on SO decided that just in case I wouldn't honor my trivial agreement with Intel and just in case I wouldn't pay taxes, they would prevent further discussion of it. How could they possibly know my intentions? Nobody asked them to interpret the intentions of Intel and do what they think is their bidding for them! They are a bunch of toadies who way overstep their bounds.
You're raising a bunch of very legitimate concerns, and they speak to how deeply @#$#@%ed the DMCA is as a law.
But I still think it's legitimate for a company like SO to err on the side of taking things down. You can cast it as being toadies, you can cast it as CYA. You can also cast it as an abundance of caution. It's probably a distinction without a difference, but words are funny things like that. The lawyers who are often setting these policies are presumably thinking in terms of their professional responsibility, which is to minimize the chance that their employer gets sued. They're probably not thinking in terms of unlikely hypotheticals involving hostage scenarios, because "We thought it was OK to bend the rules because otherwise X might happen" is unlikely to hold up in court. The American courts are more like Immanuel Kant than Jeremy Bentham about these sorts of things. Nor do they give a crap about your free tablet, or whether or not Intel gives a crap about your free tablet. It's way too expensive for them to be making these decisions on a case-by-case basis.
Maybe that's not exactly how SO was thinking. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are not lawyers, nor do I know if they consulted their lawyers. Nor am I a lawyer. But I had a dream where I played one on TV once, and that's more than a passing qualification for weighing in on legal matters around here.
I've noticed you didn't post this under your real name...
You are asking a company to help you do something illegal, on writing and published to the entire world in a high visibility site. Do you really thing they shouldn't reserve the right to deny help?
The DMCA bothers me a lot, because on my country I have the right to remove restrictions on anything I own, yet it's hard to find a safe forum to discuss how to do it without it being taken down for some commercial reason. But it's really undeserved entitlement to expect other people to risk themselves helping you.
The law in the US is such that a high-profile site that does business in the USA, like SO, is entirely reasonable if it wants to to err on the side of caution on these things. Not all the questions around the DMCA have been settled by the courts, so, no, we can't necessarily say for sure what is legal and illegal. But we can say that volunteering to help everyone to figure this out could be a very expensive proposition.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...