I'm confused. Unless the article is wrong, "It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs" seems to state that he did break a law.
It makes quite a bit of sense to do a stunt like this, although I certainly would not be willing to be the person to risk it. The way most of the anti-piracy outfits work is to make vague claims about the legality of various actions, and demand a settlement. Sure, its cheaper to do that for both parties, but if they're just waving about a threat that has never been upheld (or not upheld) in court, it creates problems.
IANAL but the license for the product you bought has to specifically mention, that you are not allowed to break the DRM, but there are exceptions, for example you are allowed to break it for interoperability and last I read about this it specifically mentioned “to play on another OS” as a reason.
Even if the license does prevent you from breaking the DRM you can seek to get it removed if you have a reason for needing to copy the material (non-commercially). The vendor has 4 weeks to reply to such request, after which you are free to break it yourself, if the vendor does not reply.
But as said, IANAL — maybe some of all those who down-voted my original comment can help? ;)
I can't tell if you're referring to the US position here (as you did originally), or the Danish implementation of the EU's Directive 2001/29/EC. If it's the former, I'm afraid you're wrong.
Per DMCA, every three years the Register of Copyrights solicits written appeals and holds a series of public hearings to consider which classes of works should be exempted. The Librarian of Congress makes a determination about the exemptions for the following three year period. The 2009 rulemaking process is ongoing, but so far this has been done in 2000, 2003, and 2006.
In those appeals, the public asked for exemptions for circumvention of DVDs for non-infringing use. The Librarian of Congress asked for them to fuck off.
Yea, no doubt most. But most is not all. So in my opinion it's not ambiguous, and not contradictory. It's still stupid, but it's not really ambiguous. It just means if it has DRM and it's commercial, you'll have to find another way to rip a copy, or go rip a commercial disk without DRM.
True, there is probably an interpretation of the laws in which they are not contradictory. If the intent of the home backup law was to allow copying of any video/dvd at home, and the intent of the drm law was to stop any copying of videos/dvds, then it really depends what exactly the laws are, and whether a court case about intent can lead to those laws being changed/clarified.
Unfortunately we only have uninformed guesses, so I say wait on it for 3 months and see if the guy gets his day in court. I shall set a date in my calendar to google it :-)
No. Like someone else said, you can make a perfect bitwise copy of a DVD without running afoul of anticircumvention laws--just copy it with the DRM intact.
If he had done it on US soil though (perhaps in front of the US embassy) there could have been an actual dilemma.