The US introduced the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) back in 1998.

From time to time the US revises it ..

The latest set of revisions, as reported by Digital Trends, are a little .. well .. “odd” would be too polite a word, so let’s go with “crazy”.

Under the new provisions in the DMCA a lot of the things that we all do in Europe would be deemed illegal.

While you can “jail break” a smartphone, if you try to unlock it so that you can use it with another network operator this is now deemed illegal.

Other changes are simply illogical:

Ripping a DVD you legally own so you can watch the movie or TV shows on a device that cannot play DVDs, like a tablet or laptop without an optical drive, is illegal. Same goes for CDs. As Michael Weinberg of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge notes, this rule “flies in the face of reality,” especially given the fact that both the MPAA and RIAA agree that consumers should be allowed to do this.

Copyright legislation is not exactly renowned for being logical ..

 

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About the Author: Michele Neylon
Michele is founder and managing director of domain registrar and hosting company Blacknight. He blogs mostly over on michele.blog
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1 min readCategories: Gadgets, softwareTags: , , , , Last Updated: October 29, 2012

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