> Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility — by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example — that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.
This is not only an injustice, but also a stupidity. What I do with something I paid for should concern only me as long as it's within my personal bounds (no redistribution, no profit, no business, etc.) Breaking DRM for personal use should not and cannot be illegal.
Nobody really cares what people do locally on their own. But companies do care when people share this local work with others. And any tool for accessibility can be used for this in one way or another.
This is simply a problem of two opposing forced where both have legitimated reasons for their demand. And so far the weak side is losing. It would be better to find some compromise. Having tools and readers with official support for blind people should be the obvious solution. Why do they even need to fight against the publishers, instead of working with them together?
If companies care when people share the work with others means that the act they want to prevent is breaking copyright this way, and it becomes a question of enforcement.
I understand its basically impossible to enforce all cases once they have the raw digital text, but does that mean we should ban OCR software and limit the access to high quality scanners in case they are used for copyright infringement? That seems an absurd cost to protect the existing business model. But is also the conclusion to banning DRM circumvention efforts. I think instead we can just go after people selling large number of copies like we always have and publishing will survive.
If your business model requires you to break other people’s property rights to something that you ostensibly sold them, in order to enforce it, it usually isn’t a viable business model! Except when you have a massive army of lawyers apparently.
Much like one cannot have a patented trade secret. The grant of patent requires disclosure, and using the court system to publicly resolve disputes.
If one uses technical means to protect information, parent poster proposes that courts should decline to protect it under the copyrights regime as well. Certainly, they should not protect both the information and whatever technical device is used to do private enforcement.
You can either use the public protection regime, or your own private protection device, but not both.
The issue at hand is that copyright implicitly includes an agreement to allow the work to pass into public domain after the copyright term expires. Technology that prevents that is anathema to the agreement. At the least, such schemes should fail-open, such that archived copies may be read as plaintext when the copyright term expires.
The argument doesn't really track but it's very much worth examining DRM and its relationship with/effects on copyright and the rights of consumers, anyway.
DRM is frequently used not just to protect copyright, but to also completely control access beyond the purpose of copyright. See the recent Denuvo snafu for an example of this being done (presumably) by accident, noting that it can also be done on purpose to e.g. plan obsoletion. It doesn't just control copyright, it controls your actual rights to access content you legally own and hinges that access on running a service in perpetuity, which is not the least bit realistic. It's digital rights management but treats those rights like a privilege instead.
Think about patents. If you get a patent, you are legally protected from people stealing your patented idea for the lifetime of the patent. However, in exchange for that protection, you must make the idea public. In exchange for the protection of law, a patent holder sacrifices the protection of secrecy.
A simmiliar model could be applied to copyright, in exchange for legal protections, you must forgo technical protections.
This is not only an injustice, but also a stupidity. What I do with something I paid for should concern only me as long as it's within my personal bounds (no redistribution, no profit, no business, etc.) Breaking DRM for personal use should not and cannot be illegal.